Prologue
Prologue
If today you acquire a book that announces itself as a devotional, or has been marketed as such, you do not expect to find it made up of expository sermons and essays, both doctrinal and historical. Books with such contents do not call themselves devotionals, and self-styled devotionals ordinarily consist of meditations and prayers on aspects of daily life, and no more. Is there anything odd about this? I suggest there is.
Reflected here, as it seems to me, is the slimmed-down, man-centred idea of devotion to God that has currently become all too common. Like much more of the historic Christian vocabulary, devotion is a cheapened word nowadays, and a secularised one into the bargain. We speak freely of devotion to a cause, or to one’s spouse or children, or to one’s work, but it is rare to hear of devotion to God. Why is that? Is it that we are not devoted to God as our forebears were, or that we conceal our devotion in a way that our predecessors did not? Whatever the reason, the fact is there, and our idea of devotion appears foreshortened. Once it signified adhering to God, the Father, the Son and the Spirit, in loyalty and love with all one’s heart, mind, soul and strength; a single-minded concentration on praising and pleasing God as our life’s key activities. And included in the understanding of devotion was an appetite for learning wisdom from didactic study and exposition of Scripture. In former days, preaching and devotion were seen as correlates – faithful Bible teaching fed hearers with truth to trust, digest, and live out, and faithful Christians looked for, and longed for, didactic displays of biblical thought and teaching by which to shape their self-management in both living with God and relating to family, friends, colleagues and other human beings.
Examples of expository ministry with a devotional direction, such as was once desired and appreciated, include the preaching of C.H. Spurgeon, who during his forty-year concentration on setting forth the saving grace of Christ covered just about everything in Christian doctrine, ethics and spiritual life; Matthew Henry’s written exposition of the Bible, garnished with shrewd practical observations of all sorts; and many more of the Puritans’ homiletic products, samples of which are introduced in the following pages.
Would we refer to Spurgeon’s sermons, or Matthew Henry’s massives volumes, or Stephen Charnock’s supersize sermons on The Existence and Attributes of God, or the extended expositions of any other Puritan writer, as devotionals? I doubt whether many of us would, but I think that all of us should; for, in my understanding of devotion, that is what they really are. I ask my readers to think from the outset of the Puritans as writers of devotionals, and I hope by the end of the book to have convinced you that is truly is so. And if, in fact, this book of mine came to be thought of as itself a devotional introducing other devotionals and their authors, no one would be more pleased than I.
J.I. Packer
May 2012