I know I should read more of the Puritans. J. I. Packer said it. I believe it. That settles it. But… there are so many obstacles—the Shakespearian language. The tiny print. The not-cheap multi-volume sets that take up so much space on a bookshelf and require a major time investment to read. So three cheers for Lewis Allen and Banner of Truth for taking away some of my lame excuses in this collection of 11 sermons and 3 chapters from the great seventeenth-century preacher John Flavel (pronounced ‘Fla-velle’). As Allen puts it in a short introduction, Flavel “knew Jesus Christ” and “knew the human heart,” and his message needs no updating. However, this edition lightly updates archaic words and where Flavel quotes Scripture, it inserts the equivalent text from the NIV. There’s a short introduction to give some context to each chapter, and some of the learned illustrations from Cicero and other antiquities have been cut. Various headings in the text have been added and removed to make the sermons easier to follow.
The sermons themselves are gems. The first is on John 3:16 and unpacks what it means that God gave his Son. Flavel gives us 11 pages of implications that flow directly from that one word: “For God to bestow the mercy of mercies, the most precious thing in heaven or earth, upon poor sinners; and, as great, as lovely, as excellent as his Son was, yet not to account him too good to bestow upon us – what manner of love is this!…let it be considered on whom the Lord bestowed his Son. Upon angels? No, but upon men. Upon man his friend? No, but upon his enemies. This is love.” (p. 11).
The sermons are beautifully Trinitarian, full of razor-sharp analysis of the text (e.g., what are we set free from in John 8:36 and what aren’t we set free from?), and filled, not just with exhortations to love Jesus, but reasons to love him. Flavel’s preaching brims over with applications of comfort to those in Christ (“If I am Christ’s, then let him take care of me, and indeed, in so doing, he is only taking care of his own.”), and urgent warnings to those who reject him (“Have you imagined a hell you could bear? Is it easy to perish?”). It’s deeply realistic (“The greatest difficulty in conversion is to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion is to keep the heart with God.”), as well as practical—two sermons in the book are given over to how to read providence wisely and cheerfully (“Let those be cast down who have no God in trouble to turn to.”).
The sermons are short enough to read each one in a sitting or two. They’d make a great Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon treat. I read them on Sunday mornings so that I could be pastored before I preached to others, and they have left me wanting to make space for those six volumes of Flavel’s collected works!