The following is one of my favorite stories. It recounts the words and actions of 17th Century Puritan preacher John Rogers as he pleaded with his congregation to love and heed the Word of God.
I have often tried to imagine what it would be like to see this event actually play out. I have often used this as an illustration against the view that the Puritans were dull (especially in their church services). I’ve acted the scene out for teenagers, and for my children. And I have often applied this story to myself when my desire to read and hear the Word of God is waning. The scene still affects me every time I read or imagine it:
Mr. Rogers was…on the subject of the Scriptures. And in that sermon he falls into an expostulation with the people about their neglect of the Bible…He personates God to the people telling them, ‘Well, I have trusted you so long with my Bible: you have slighted it; it lies in such and such a house all covered with dust and cobwebs. You care not to look at it. Do you use my Bible so? We you shall have my Bible no longer.’ And he takes up the Bible from his cushion and seemed as if he were going away with it and carrying it from them; but immediately [he] turns again and personates the people to God, falls down on his knees, cries and pleads most earnestly, ‘Lord, whatsoever thou dost to us take not thy Bible from us; kill our children, burn our houses, destroy our goods; only spare us thy Bible, only take not away thy Bible.’ And the he personates God again to he people, ‘Say you so? Well, I will try you a little while longer; and here is my Bible for you, I will see how you use it, whether you will love it more, whether you will value it more, whether you will observe it more, whether you will practise it more and live more according to it.’
The great preacher Thomas Goodwin was on hand for that sermon. An associate of his recalled the rest of Goodwin’s story:
By these actions (as the Doctor [Thomas Goodwin] told me) he put all the congregation into so strange a posture that he never saw any congregation in his life…the people generally…were…deluged with their own tears; and he told me that he himself when he got out and was to take horse again to be gone was fain to hang a quarter of an hour upon the neck of his horse weeping, before he had the power to mount, so strange an impression was there upon him and generally upon the people upon having been thus expostulated with for neglect of the Bible.
-from Peter Lewis, The Genius of Puritanism, pp. 22-23
- Amos 8:11 “Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord GOD, “when I will send a famine on the land- not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. 12 They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.
The more you feast now the less danger there is of famine to come.
