If you still need encouragement to read about the Puritans, let me be the first to offer it to you. Peter Lewis’ small paperback on The Genius of Puritanism is beautifully written. This work focuses on the preaching of the Puritans with its application to the people in the pew. Not only a great historical resource, but a practical guide for the way many of us believe pastoral ministry should still be done. Also includes extensive quotations from the Puritans themselves. One of Lewis’ stated goals is to encourage the actual reading of the Puritans’ works.

If you can keep from finding and reading this book after reading the opening two paragraphs then you’re a better man than am I (no smart-aleck comments please)!

It is questionable whether Christians can ever look for the regeneration of the world before they seek the reformation of the Church. If we are horrified at the state of the world in our generation, can we be less anxious about the state of the Church within that world? If the light that is in the world be darkness, how great is that darkness! And in a day when, in the very Church of God, we too often see law denigrated, grace abused, truth neglected as ‘mere doctrine’, and experience placed on a par with revelation, we have urgent need to ask (without fault) why ‘the former times were better than these’.

To neglect God’s work in the past is to neglect his Word in the present, for throughout history God has raised up men and movements whose great work was to expound and apply that Word their own generation, and by implication to ours also. Such men were the Puritans and such a movement was Puritanism.

The best place to purchase this book is from Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.