Wow.
I am glad to have read this and this.
It is a good reminder of how fundamentally flawed we all our and our great need of a Savior.
It is also an urgent warning to carefully and ruthlessly evaluate our own lives to see if we are really living in ways that match up with the gospel.
I think the person who looks back at the Puritans and wonders how they could have done this probably doesn’t know themselves as well as they think. We are all experts in self-deception and masters of rationalization. These stories are not just old news from a different era. (Just recently someone was telling me the Bible teaching church they were visiting was “old” South Africa. Whether it is true or not, it is how they felt.) And I am sure they are not alone. There are many of us who are sitting and listening to good preaching or even maybe doing good preaching who are still treating people in ways that are far below God’s standards and the anger we feel when we hear stories like these will be best directed at ourselves instead of people who died hundreds of years ago.
Perhaps that anger will stop us from using the fact that we listen to good preaching as an excuse for poor living and to use the extra energy our anger gives us to do the hard work of breaking down our own rationalizations for attitudes and behaviour that contradict the good news of Jesus Christ.
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