Preaching and The Conscience

I am preaching a series of messages through the life of Peter at the moment and it has been a blessing to me to dig into the early stages of his interaction with our Lord.  In the second message, I preached about the Lord changing the name of Peter and spent some time preaching about the necessity of the conscience being struck with the Word of God.  A quote that I wove into the message was from a book that Tony Mansinho sent to me a few weeks ago.  It is the biography of Master Robert Bruce—Minister in the Kirk of Edinburgh by D. C. Macnicol.  Bruce was one of the Scottish Puritans and despite some of their flaws, I have been incredibly blessed for close to thirty years by digging into their writings.  Some time was spent by Macnicol exploring the matter of the conscience of Bruce being smitten by God and the Holy Scriptures.  Here is the quote that I used: 

Shakespeare and Preaching

She was probably in her mid-thirties when I met her.  Professional and articulate would be very good descriptive terms for her.  She had come to the Radiology Department for a CT scan for some diagnostic test that has long since escaped my memory.  Prior to these kinds of tests, I would take a brief medical history and then start an IV for the contrast to be injected during the scan.  Throughout that timeframe, I would be with a patient for about 10-15 minutes or so which gave me an occasion to get to know about their background as well as their medical situation.  When I asked her about her occupation, she told me that she was an English Literature professor who taught all of the Shakespeare classes at one of our local colleges.  Although I greatly enjoy books and have for most of my lifetime, I confessed that I would have some difficulty spending so much time with Shakespeare and all of his works. 

A Lifting Up for the Downcast - William Bridge

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If you are not familiar with the Banner of Truth Trust, you are missing out.  Over the years, I have found that the Banner of Truth does an excellent job with not only the content of their books but the craftsmanship as well.  Their hardbound editions are especially nice, but their paperbacks also hold up well over time.  This is especially true for what they have defined as the Puritan Paperbacks.  I believe there are around 250 separate titles in this series with the pages ranging from generally 100 to as many as 300.  I do not have all of these in my personal library but the ones I do own have always served me well especially when traveling.  Obviously, you can obtain them in digital format, but I still have to confess that I favor actual books themselves given the opportunities to mark up the pages and write in the margins. 

William Bridge has one that the Banner has published on Psalm 42:11 entitled A Lifting Up for the Downcast.  This is a compilation of thirteen sermons on that single verse.  That is one of the hallmarks of the Puritans.  Many of these men were biblical expositors in the truest sense of the word.  They drank deeply from the Scriptures and then mixed in deep meditative thinking over what they had mined out of the Word and preached to their churches.  This series of messages were preached in 1648 to those who were experiencing what we could understand as “spiritual depression.”  I am afraid that the remedy for this generation would be to reach for an anti-depressant or an anxiolytic to provide relief.  However, the Puritans obviously believed that the best remedy for those kinds of maladies was the Word.