WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Equip Ministries Podcast: Dr. Joel Beeke on the Puritans and the Pursuit of Godliness

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

Join us for the second guest episode with hosts Patrick Scott and Ethan Davenport as they interview Dr. Joel Beeke, Chancellor of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. Dr. Beeke talks about his upbringing, the history of Puritanism, common misconceptions about the Puritans, and what practical lessons they can teach us on pursuing a life of godliness. 

You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. This is the Equip Ministries podcast. My name is Patrick Scott, and with me to my left, I have Ethan Davenport. And we are blessed to have Dr. Joel Beakey to join us today. Dr. Joel Beake is the chancellor of Puritan Reform Theological Seminary. He is going to be giving a lecture at Hillsdale College tonight on what can the Puritans teach us today. And we have the pleasure of sitting down with him now and talking a little bit about that in the studio. So Dr. Beki, it's a pleasure to have you. Great to be with you guys. Thanks very much. We'll jump right into the conversation.

So, Ethan, how about you kick us off? So Dr. Beke, you're kind of well-known in the reformed and in Protestant circles for being an expert on the Puritans. And so what initially drew you to the Puritans? What exposed you to them and what, yeah, drew you to study them? Yes, well, thanks for the question. I was brought up in a very God-fearing home. My parents just love the Lord, prayer warriors, and when I close my eyes, I can see my dad just praying for us,

weeping over us, and the need to be born again, and to come to repentance and faith and fly to Christ. And my mother, I can see just on her knees all the time praying for us. So I had a wonderful upbringing, just amazing. But when I was nine years old, I came under severe conviction of sin when the Lord answered one of my prayers very powerfully and suddenly. And it was like God became real to me, very real. And then I realized what a sinner I was. So I went to my dad's bookcase and I looked around for a book I could possibly read. And I saw a book by the most famous of all.

all Puritans, John Bunyan, and it was the life and death of Mr. Badman. I thought, well, that's got to be a book for me because I'm a bad boy, so bad man. So I read through that whole book, and my conviction of sin just became worse, more severe. And that lasted for about six months, and then it just kind of faded away. But during those six months, I wouldn't even play ball with my brothers. I just needed to find God, but I didn't. find him. So it's what reformed theologians would call temporary faith, perhaps, or common convictions of the spirit. But then when I was 14, it came back in a much more powerful and deeper way. And I actually saw that I had never not sinned in my life because I was never loving God above all,

never loving my neighbors myself. So I was always sinning, at least by omission, if not by commission. So I went back to my dad's bookcase, and it was just filled with Puritan writings, old Banner Truth paperbacks and so on. And I hold myself up in my bedroom every night after I got home from school, finished my homework as quick as I could. I would just read the Bible from cover to cover, and then maybe for an hour, pray. Then I would read the Puritans for two, three, four hours until maybe 12, one o'clock in the morning every night. And my dad gave me permission to mark up all these books. So I've inherited them now, but I can see all my markings still as a 14-year-old. I read the whole bookcase in maybe a year and a half or so. And there were other things

involved that led me to liberty in Christ finally when I was 16 or 15. But in those 18 months, I think the Puritans were the primary impact in my life, primary spiritual discipline, really, that led me to Christ, combined with reading the Bible. And then when I was 16, I was overwhelmingly called to the ministry, the most real personal thing I've ever experienced in my life. I've never doubted for one moment in the last 57 years that that was genuine. And that that, made me want to devour even more of the Puritan writings because they're so rich, so spiritual, so applicable in every area of life. And so by the time I was still 16, I felt compelled to start a book ministry. So I started Bible Truth books in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which is still

going on, but it's in different hands now. So I started selling Puritan books there in some other books as well that were sound and reformed and biblical. And when I was accepted my denomination to study for the ministry, which was when I was 21, I had to give up Bible Truth books. But when I was ordained in Sioux Center, Iowa, among 700 farmers when I was 25, after completing the MDIV, I was immediately appointed to be the head of the book and publishing committee. of my denomination. That was called, at that time, Nellin's Reform Book and Publishing Committee.

So again, I got into publishing Puritans and other similar books, and I poured my heart into that awe. And then tuition, I mean, my donation money, most of it went to that, and I just loved selling books to people. And seeing their lives changed.

and I saw a number of people's lives changed through reading it. And that went on for a number of years, and then in 1993, we had a sad denominational split. And we had to start a new denomination. And we had nine or ten churches that came and joined us. And I decided at that point, because I lost all the books, I lost all the money I put into the books, to the old denomination. So I decided to start a new thing called Reformation Heritage Books. And I decided to fill the board with people from several different denominations,

but mostly from my own denomination, the majority anyway. But I wanted to be interdenominational board. I didn't want the church to own the book ministry. And that has just been such a blessing in my life for the last 30-some years. So now at Reformation Heritage Books, what we do is we sell, well, this year we're printing, for example, we're publishing 68 books, and 50% of the books will either be by the Puritans or about the Puritans. So we've, obviously, we've become the most prolific Puritan publisher in the world. and it's just growing by leaps and bounds people all over the world.

I'm talking hundreds of thousands of people are starting to read the Puritans. And right now we're translating. What we're doing right now is a big thing. I'll just share that with you. It's called Puritan Treasures for Today. We call it PTT. And we take Puritan books that are 200 pages or less that are very informative on practical issues, spiritual issues, that relate to today.

John Flaville, triumphing over sinful fear. And then some basic books that are just solid, like William Perkins, the perfect Redeemer, or George Swinnock, the boundless God, getting to know God better. And we have Stephen Yule, Dr. Stephen Yule, who's an expert on the Puritans. And he's, he works for us full time now, and he's a professor at Southwestern in Texas. But just a great man of God and very capable. And he looks at every single word, any word that's antiquarian or too difficult, he changes into contemporary equivalent so that no meaning is lost. And it's geared so that a 14-year-old can adequately comprehend it. So guess what? Gone are the days when people complain, I can't read the Puritans, right? So we're doing 250 of these books.

And right now we've got 19 done. There's about 35 more in the hopper. And Dr. Ewell is just doing this day and night. And the goal is to translate them into 38 languages around the world, which reaches 93% of the world's population in terms of language facility. And then we're going to give them away. We're going to have a donor stream. In fact, we do have a donor stream.

Reformation Heritage's books, this is already up and going. And we were going to fund through the generosity of God's people all these translations and the distribution of them all over the world, also in hard-to-reach people groups. And so the goal is that 10 years from now, when these 250 books will all be out there, there'll be at any given moment, millions and millions of people around the world, reading these savory, rich, biblical, reformed spiritual books that grow them will be used to convert them by the grace of the Holy Spirit. And just bring, the beauty of the Puritans is they bring you to much, much, much

deeper maturity in the faith. because they set the bar high and they move you to obey Paul's injunction imperative. Whatsoever you do, whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God. So they don't just let you settle as someone who says, oh, well, I've made a decision for Christ. I'm a Christian now I can pretty much live the way I want. No, no, no. You give your whole life to the Lord. In every area of your life, you're living solely deal with glory.

So that's my passion. And later on in the process, I went to Westminster Seminary, get my Ph.D. and Reformation and post-Reformation studies. And the Puritans being post-Reformation, I got to do a lot of work at the Ph.D. level on the Puritans. And, yeah, I have been privileged to write, I don't know, 20, 30 books on the Puritans myself. Praise God. Wow. It's wonderful. So it seems like, in your testimony, the Puritans are very warm and Christ exulting and have been really a means of grace for you and for so many others.

And that for a lot of people, and a lot of Christians even, that kind of runs contrary to their impression of who the Puritans are. They hear that high bar and really strict, maybe even legalism as a word that's used. So what are some of the common misconceptions about the Puritans as a group as much as we can classify them as one? And then what would your response be to those misconceptions? Well, the misconceptions are many, and I'll tell you why. Whenever you have a group that's zealous for God and lives more according to the Bible than you do and you think you're a Christian, it's a little unsettling. so you got to find something wrong with them oh they were slave owners well you tell me one one puritan that was a

slave owner in in america i i suppose there maybe are a few that had a couple jonathan eberts did but he treated them incredibly well they were part of the family went to church he were in family worship he loved them he prayed for them okay it was still wrong right it was a blind spot for Edwards. Edwards, however, is the one debatable figure. Do we call him a Puritan or do we not? Because he's 1703 to 1758. And the Puritan movement basically came to an end around 1700.

So most scholars today don't call him a Puritan. I waffle a bit myself, and I do include him in my book because I think he's like the Apostle Paul. He said, I'm an apostle born out of due time. I think that's what Edwards is like. He's very Puritan-esque. But what most people don't realize is that slave owners were mainly an 18th, in 19th century phenomenon, not the 17th century, which is the Puritan age.

So that caricature is almost entirely wrong. In fact, many of the Puritans, when they just started bringing in slaves, many of them wrote against it strongly, like Richard Baxter and others. And then there's this idea of legalism. I mean, I've been reading, I've read over a thousand different Puritans in my life. And I can think of maybe one or two at some point we're a little bit legalistic. But how do you define legalism? You see.

So usually the people that accuse the Puritans of this are people who've never read the Puritans. And they're just going by the caricatures of the 19th century like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, which is a butcher job of the Puritans. But here's what you need to think about. If I am being strictly biblical, am I being legalistic? Absolutely not. I'm being biblical. If I add to, like the parisies did, the prescriptions of the Bible and the imperatives,

then I'm being legalistic. So if the Puritans said something like this, this, you know what? Going to the theater today is almost always sinful because there's always a breaking of the Ten Commandments in every movie, or every, not every movie, but every theatrical display. So they warned against not going to the theater because it wouldn't do your soul good. And if you're watching sin that can penetrate your heart, sounds like Daniel won, doesn't it. Daniel wouldn't partake of the Kings meet and drink because it would impact his heart negatively. So they were jealous for their own heart.

That's not legalism. Legalism is when you add something to the scriptures. Yes, the Puritans were very zealous for the Lord, but that's a good thing. That's what the Bible commands us to be. And then the Puritans were the happiest, happiest people. I've studied church history all my life. I've taught church history from ancient church to modern.

Happiest group of people I know of ever. and why were they so incredibly happy? Well, because they followed the prescriptions of the Bible on how to live. And when you follow the Bible, you're happy. Because happiness is not found by seeking happiness. Happiness is found, and the Puritans put that well as a fruit of holiness. If you focus on happiness, you're always going to be unhappy because you think you're going to find something else that's going to make you happy.

but if you focus on walking in God's ways, you see, and you really have the fear of God in you, you're truly happy. Psalm 128 is the perfect illustration of that, where blessed is the man, truly happy from within, blessed is the man who fear is the Lord. Then it goes down and say, you'll be happy with your wife,

shall be as a fruitful mind, you'll be happy with your children, olive plants around about the table, you'll be happy with your work, You'll be happy with your worship in Zion, and it concludes you'll even be happy with your grandchildren. Thou shall see thy children's children and peace upon Israel. Wow, what a happy life. So that's the way the Puritans feel it. You live totally for God. You live according to the Bible, and you seek to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ, and you will meet the purpose

for which you're created here on earth, despite remaining in dwelling sin, you'll be able to say, my goal, my passion in life, oh, could it be more pure, could it be better, is to live for the glory of God. So that would be an ideal, right? Yes. Because when we talk about, you know, Blessed is the man, Psalms absolutely chock full of those, you know, and maybe we would kind of lump the proverbs in with that as well. A lot of times it seems like we might bump into things that seem, oh, like this kind of sounds sort of like prosperity theology almost. But we don't want to mix it up with that. But we also don't want to maybe diminish what the Bible says about this and that, you know, the Lord gives us the law so that we will be happy and that we'll find satisfaction in him.

So how do we hold these two things in balance here? Yes. Well, the puritan. would say to that, and I think they're right, a true Christian lives both in the context of Romans 8, which is a victorious life, right? We're more than conquerors through him who loved us, and nothing shall separate us from the love of Christ, through the indwelling of the Spirit, who takes the things of Christ and reveals them to us. So we are truly happy, and that's kind of an ideal life to the Christian life. But we still have our old nature. that clings to us and that causes us to struggle and we're disappointed with ourselves in many ways

because Romans 7, Paul is grappling with his own weaknesses, right? The good that I would, I find myself not doing. Oh, wretched man, that I am, evil I would not do. I find myself doing. Help me, Lord. Right? The answer is there. The answer is I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord,

through union with Christ and then commune, out of that union. I learn more and more that how to beat back sin and put a sword through it and not let it have dominion over me, Romans 6 and 7. So that kind of balance of Paul you will find in all the Puritan writers. They'll encourage you to dedicate yourself even more to the Lord, but to also comfort you that even though you wrestle with sin, if you bring it daily to Christ, There's forgiveness with him. And you long, when you're a true Christian, you're really long for the day when you have no more sin and be with the Lord forever. And that's the beauty of the Christian life.

So like the post-Pyritan, Charles Spurgeon said, Christians get the best of both worlds. They have a joy in communion with God in this world that the world never knows about. and that joy is 10,000 times greater than anything this world can offer you. But the best is yet to be. They get the best of the world to come where there'll be no more sin. Just think of it, no more sin. I'll never say another word. I'll never think another thought.

I'll never commit another action. And that is sinful. And I won't even have any sins of omission. I'll be always loving God above all. I'll be always loving my neighbor and heaven. heaven as myself. Heaven, as Edwards put it, is a perfect world of love. So in a way, there is an element of prosperity theology to it, but it's just not now, it's then, right? You know, it's in glorification. Or would you say it differently? Yeah, I'd say it differently.

I'd say the prosperity theology is altogether different. That's a psychological theology that's just trying to say, oh man, look, brother, you can have the best of this world. You can have everything you want. You're poor now, but you can be rich. This is not Puritanism at all. Puritanism is you be content with what you have, and whatever you do have, you give it to the glory of God. I've never read a single sentence in every, any Puritan book that remotely resembles prosperity theology. Now, prosperity theology and having an optimistic view of God's covenant faithfulness and his ability to save us. Those are two very different things. The Puritans, don't forget, suffered a lot. They had a lot of affliction in their lives.

The average Puritan family had nine children, and the average Puritan family lost 50%, either four or five, I would say, average of their children before they reached adulthood. Can you imagine going to the grave with five children? So, and there were plagues that came through and wiped out big chunks of Puritans and Anglicans, too, for that matter, in England. It was the great fire of London. And, you know, it was hard sledding to put food on the table for some of them. They worked 13-hour days, on an average, but they were joyful in the Lord because they were dedicating everything, everything to the Lord. So they wrote a lot of books on how to cope with affliction.

Thomas Brooks, the Mute Christian Under the Rod. What a book that is. Thomas Watson, all things for good, building off of Romans 828. All things that work together for good for those who love God's people, who love God. William Bridge, are lifting up for the downcast, looking at 22 different things that can get a believer downcast. and why you don't need to be depressed, because this two shall work together for your good.

So they were masters at teaching afflicted people how to be joyful in the Lord with their affliction. Prosperity theology is God's going to take away all your afflictions, give you a whole bunch of good things you're going to be rich and you're going to be happy by external stuff. Puritan theology is Blessedness from within the word blessed to them meant you are truly happy

from within no matter what your outer circumstances are so here's something really quick I just want to throw in here as a footnote that I think illustrates it January 1 what do you say what do you say to your neighbor? Happy New Year. Happy New Year

what did the Puritans say Blessed New Year Well, doesn't blessedness mean happy? It does. But there's a deeper sense in the word blessedness. You almost feel that, don't you? Have a blessed new year. So what do we mean when we say happy new year?

Well, I think we mean something like this. Almost kind of prosperity, practical theology. I hope you don't have many afflictions this year, and I hope the wind is in your back, and the sun is in your face, and everything goes your way. And that you have few trials. When the Puritan said, a blessed New Year, they would mean something like this, and I'll paraphrase it. Dear neighbor, dear brother, I pray that in this year, whatever God in his beautiful, wise sovereignty,

fatherly sovereignty, and leading your life, whatever he deems worthy to send your way, both prosperity and affliction, that you will submit to him and grow in every way in order to give him more and more glory. It's a different way of living. Just might maybe back up a little bit for some historical context. People hear Puritans, separatists, pilgrims. Who are the Puritans when we use that label? To what does that refer? Yeah. So in church history, there is a phenomenon that's called a second-generation phenomenon. So when there's a brand new movement like the Reformation in the 16th century,

I mean, you paid a price to leave the Roman Catholic Church and become reformed. You might be killed. You'd certainly suffer in a number of ways. You'd certainly be ostracized by many friends, and you're taking a bold stand. So when you take that stand and you actually become public with that stand,

you're all in and you're very zealous and you're dedicated and you're willing to suffer for Christ's sake to become reformed. However, you have children and they grow up reformed and they sort of take for granted. That's the second generation phenomenon and they lose the zeal. They may not even be saved. Or they may be saved, but they take it more for granted. And what happens then in that sense, second-generation phenomena. Often in church history, there's a minority of people that stand up and say, wait a minute, we've lost something from the beginning of this movement, whatever the movement may be. We need to revive it. Well, that's what happened with the Puritans around 1560 or so. Just about the time Calvin died, actually, there were people that began to say, wow, we're losing,

we're losing that fresh zeal we had and we want to be more more godly we want to be totally sold out with what the scriptures say and so they began to express dissatisfaction with the Anglican church some of them would say well the Anglican church is a halfway house between the reformed faith of Calvin in Geneva for example or Bollinger in Switzerland or Peter Martyr in Italy. And the Anglican Church is kind of a watered down reform faith. Outwardly, it's kind of reformed, but they still keep a lot of Roman Catholic customs that are not biblical. So we want a purer reformation. And in Dutch, they called it a further reformation. In English, it came to be known in a pejorative term, Puritans.

And it was their enemies that called them Puritans. Actually, the father of Puritanism, Wayne Perkins called it a vile term. He said, because we're still sinners. But the enemies called them Puritans to say, well, you think you're so pure, you think you're so holy. I've read all these Puritan books.

I've never, never picked that up from any Puritan book that they thought they were holy. No, they wanted to be more holy. So they thought it was a vile term. But after a while, just like the Christians in Antioch, who resisted the term Christian at first, because Christian means a little Christ, and they said, no, we're not Christ.

But after a while, that label stuck. And so today, we call ourselves Christians, wanting to be like Christ. Well, after a while, the Puritans finally said, we've been fighting this term long enough. We'll just embrace it. We actually do want purity. We don't claim we have it.

but we want purity in the church, we want purity in our marriage, we want purity in the family, so, okay, we'll just accept the title. So the Puritans are moving from about 1560 to about 1700, which is astonishing that a movement with so much zeal

wanting to live holy by the Bible lasted for so long instead of just one or two years. Most revivals only last a year or two at most. And this is huge. where else in church history did you have a movement so zealous to reform the family to reform marriage to have joy in the family like never before and by the way one thing that really irritates me is when people call the puritans prudes or you know that they didn't have love to have sex and things

like that just the opposite just the opposite the ancient church fathers said you're sinning even when you make love with your wife because, well, two seeds is coming together and there's a sin there. But yeah, you need to do it to have children so it's unavoidable. And then the Roman Catholic Church came along a couple centuries later and said,

because there's sin involved, if you're at a higher level, if you're a priest, you're really not allowed to marry because marriage and sex within marriage is below that level of holiness that's required of a priest. Reformers come along, and they begin to read the original sources and the Bible, and I said, wow, this is incredible. This is a huge mistake of the Roman Catholic Church.

So Luther empties some nunneries. He ends up marrying Katie, and has a good marriage, by the way. But he wrote one sermon on marriage. That's it. Calvin, the reformers were too busy, hammering out justification by faith alone, pure worship, to really get into the nitty-gritty of everyday life. The Puritans, if you want to think of what Puritanism is, Puritanism is sitting on the reformers' shoulders, embracing all the theology of the reformers.

But then looking out of their generation and say, now we've hammered out, all these doctrines have been hammered out already, or we'll reiterate them. we want to ask the question, how does that impact your marriage? How does it impact your work? How does it impact your family? So they were the practical theologians that wanted to bring it home, as they put it, to men's businesses and bosoms. In other words, to your inner being and to your out-of-work life and to your whole way of life.

And so they wrote 29 books on marriage, how to glorify God in marriage and an equal number on how to raise children, things like that. So think of the Puritans as people who took the reformers and their theology and wanted to make it practical and use it to sanctify themselves in every area of life. And therefore we're unhappy with Anglican sermons that were filled with Hebrew and Greek phrases. No, no, they reached the people. Their sermons were loved by the people.

they told the people how to live according to the Bible, always according to the Bible. It's helpful. You know, I have a friend who's director of youth ministry at my local church here in Hillsdale, and he likes to say that the reformers reformed doctrine, and the Puritans were interested in reforming the heart. And so echoing a lot of what you're saying there. Yeah, I don't want to throw the reformers under the bus here because they were interested in reforming. Right, at risk of oversimplification, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

But you're talking about the major emphasis. I think that would be true. I've got two more questions, and we're going to probably have to wrap it up in a little bit. One is just a rapid-fire question. And you can give me the name, the author, and maybe one sentence of what it's about. But if you had to pick three books as someone who's never read the Puritans, where should they start? Yes. I would start with the PTT series, and I would start with something like the Perfect Redeemer by William Perkins,

because it's so simple to read, and it will show you how much the Puritans love the Lord Jesus Christ, and it will move you to love him more if you're a true Christian. If you're not a true Christian, I would do Turn and Live by Nathaniel Vincent. It's an evangelistic book. but if you want, if you're talking about getting into the actual writings of the Puritans where it hasn't been simplified at all, probably the simplest writer is Thomas Watson. And we are doing right now, by the way, it's going to come out in June, the complete works of Thomas Watson for the first time in history, seven complete volumes. Watson is an amazing writer, short sentences,

simple to understand, but full of spiritual depth. And, oh, did he love Christ? How he can express that. And he's just so endearing, moves your soul Godward. And I would probably pick the kingdom of heaven taken by storm as the first book to read of the actual Puritans that have not been touched by a human pen since the Puritan age. that book introduces you one chapter at a time how to use all the means of grace with the

goal all the spiritual disciplines with the goal of drawing you closer to god so a chapter on how to meditate chapter on how to pray chapter on how to read the bible chapter on how to partake the lord's supper etc who is your dr bicki your favorite puritan to read or the one from whom you've benefited the most watson was when i was 15 16 17 17 then that I read Thomas Goodwin, which Goodwin and Owen are the two most difficult Puritans, I would say, probably, when I was 17. I read Christ our mediator. And, oh, that book just opened up the world of Jesus Christ and his riches for me like nothing else ever did. And so I owe a lot to Goodwin. And Goodwin was my favorite author for probably 40 years. And lately, with Owen running a close second. But, um, Lately, I've been into Anthony Burgess and not very well known, but his works have never been done and we're scheduled to begin them next year, eight volumes, to edit them and publish them. Burgess is very rich.

He brings together all the strengths of the Puritans being very biblical, sweetly doctrinal, eminently practical and warmly experiential. It's all there in Burgess. Burgess was one of the major figures at the Westminster Assembly as well. And, yeah, I would love... But, of course, I grew up on John Bunyan. My dad read Pilgrim's Progress to us every Sunday night

for 30 to 45 minutes, and we five kids would just sit at his feet literally and pepper him with questions, and he'd set the book down, and often with weeping, he'd explain to us the answers to our questions and how the Holy Spirit would work in the soul of sinners he converts.

and it was so, so precious. And I actually grew up thinking all dads did this. But it was very, very precious. So I grew up on Bunyan. I still love Bunyan. And Bunyan, by the way, has 50, 60 books in three fat volumes. We're also hoping to do in the next couple of years a definitive edition of the complete works of John Bunyan.

And one really exciting thing is we're actually next month we're coming out with the first vine. There's four coming out this year. It's been in the works for six years. You know, there's Scottish Puritans with a small pea, and there's Dutch Puritans with a small pea, and the German pietists you could say is kind of an offshoot of Puritanism as well.

But my favorite Scottish Puritan with a small pea is Samuel Rutherford. And we're doing, for the first time ever, the complete works of Samuel Rutherford. 65 scholars are involved in this. And Jevin Dixhorn, is the main editor and myself and three other guys are general editors. And the first volume coming out next month is on Rutherford's systematic theology against

the Armenians showing the beauty of the doctrines of grace. Never translated before from Latin. So we've got four or five of the volumes. I've never been translated before. And just we're really excited about that. Rutherford is such a rich Christ-centered writer and bringing him back out in all of his writings in a well-edited edition with good 50 to 100-page prefaces in front of every volume talking about it historically and theologically and practically.

It's very exciting. Okay, and then last question here, and I'm actually going to, I've got two questions and I'm going to give you a choice of which one you want to answer. Okay. All right. First one is for us college students, or you could answer it generally, how can, in our busy lives, how can we be filled with the spirit? And then the second question is, if the Puritans were alive and active today, what would they say about our current digital age with phones, social media, online church, all of the above? I'm going to go for the first one because the second one you're going to speculate a little bit, aren't you?

answer that. So the Holy Spirit indwells every believer, but we in our sanctification efforts are co-labors with him. So the Puritans would say, what you need to do is to really use the spiritual disciplines in your daily life, to grow you so that as you strive to kill sin and to live holy to God, the Spirit assisting you, being your inward co-worker, so to speak. You look to the spirit, you realize you can't do this yourself, but at the same time, you're working hard at it. That's key in Puritan thinking. So the whole Puritan theology would help you in this way. First of all, they show you how to shape your life by Scripture, and that's at the heartbeat of sanctification. Secondly, they teach you how to integrate biblical doctrine into your life experience.

That's rich, and that will grow you with more of a realization of the spirit's work within you. Thirdly, they teach you how to bring the gospel not just into your own heart, but through your heart, through your sanctification, into your home as a father, as a mother, as a child, being obedient to parents. They're very family-centered. Fourthly, they teach you how to maintain biblical balance in all the doctrines of the Bible through the enlightening of the Holy Spirit. Spirit is a balancer inside of us, and the Puritans are great. Always balancing things. Yes, this is so, but they're not extremists like their enemies make them out to be. They're balancing the truth of Scripture. And then to really grow through the indwelling spirit, we need to understand the difference

between justification and sanctification, justification happening to us from without, in experiencing the joy of it, but then being sanctified. And the Puritans are great at that. And they're great at also talking about how the Holy Spirit works within us to exalt Christ, take the things of Christ and show us the beauty of Christ and to glorify the trium God. And because he is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit also delights to teach us about true spirituality, what it is. So the Puritans were big on that. Spirituality of the law, the believer's sincere obedience, spiritual warfare against indwelling sin, the childlike fear of God, the art of meditation,

the dreadfulness of hell, the glories of heaven. They capitalize on all those. They capitalize on all those things. And of course, they were really focused because the indwelling spirit teaches you how to groan with groanings that are unutterable to God, to pour out your heart, to unbosom yourself in prayer. They've got all kinds of books on how the spirit teaches us to pray. And finally, I would say the Puritans excel on teaching us how to live in two worlds at once. They always stress, by the guidance of the spirit, you always keep one eye in eternity in everything you do. Everything you do. You're thinking about how will this impact me for eternity. The other eye, you're very involved on what you're doing in time. And they said,

you want to be the best student, the best preacher, the best mother, the best businessman, the best for the Lord. The Lord deserves excellence. You want to have the best influence. You want to be a walking book of grace, epistle of grace, as Paul puts it, for those around you. But you keep that imbalance. You don't live too much for this world because you're remembering the world to come. And you don't only think about the world to come because you have a calling in this world. And the spirit within you can guide you in that way to live holy and solely for God in every area of your life. Wonderful. Well, it sounds like there's a whole lot left that we have to learn, Ethan, about the Puritans. But we are really excited for your lecture tonight. And we thank you so

much for spending the time with us here just throughout this day at Hillsdale and in this conversation. So with that, we will close out the episode. But thank you very much for listening. This again is the Equip Ministries podcast. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale on 101.7 FM.