Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast, I have with me Dr. Joel Beeke. He’s a Chancellor and Professor of Homiletics and Systematic and Practical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. He’s a Pastor of Heritage Reformed Congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He’s the Editor of Puritan Reformed Journal and Banner of Sovereign Grace Truth.
He’s the Board Chairman of Reformation Heritage Books and a frequent speaker at reformed conferences around the world. He’s authored, co-authored, and edited 250 books and has contributed thousands of articles to reform books, journals, periodicals, and encyclopedias.
Brother, we are so grateful for you to be here today and looking forward to you being with us in October at our annual conference. So, thank you for being with us at the podcast.
Joel Beeke: My pleasure.
Dale Johnson: Now, I want to get into this concept of the heart, and it’s so interesting to me how detailed the Puritans thought about the heart—how they talked about cultivating what was going on in the heart, using the Word to accomplish that by the Spirit, and also keeping the heart. I want you to tie together some ideas that we see from the Puritans—that I see prevalent within them—such as fearing the Lord and keeping the heart. Help us to understand how they tied these concepts together.
Joel Beeke: Okay. So, for the Puritan mind, as one Puritan says, “fearing God is intimately related to keeping the heart, because we have to live in the fear of God.”
“From out of the heart are the issues of life,” Proverbs 4:23 says, and that’s actually the whole theme of John Flavel’s book, Keeping the Heart. It is based on a bunch of sermons actually, based on that text.
But in the Puritan mind, you see, God needs to be feared with a childlike, loving awe and reverence because He is great and He is holy, and we’re saved by the blood of Christ. So, they make a sharp distinction between a slavish fear of God, fear of wrath, and a childlike fear. And that’s the childlike fear of God that they treasure and that they identify with keeping the heart.
And so, what does the fear of God mean? The New Testament word for it, the Puritans would say, is godliness. “In godliness, there’s great gain,” Paul writes to Timothy. But one Puritan gives this wonderful definition. I use it a lot, also in sermons.
He says this, “So in other words, God is big, and people are small. And I stand before God on the day of judgment, not before men, and I want to please God. I want to do what God wants me to do. I want to obey Him. It’s everything that’s within me, not to merit anything, but just out of sheer gratitude for His glorious salvation.”
So, this is of the essence of the fear of God. Can God smile at what I’m about to do? Oh, then I want to do it. Will God have even a small frown on what I’m about to do? Stay away from it, you know?
So, my dad was being a real Puritan, Dale, when we grew up. And when I was about 13, he made a transition in child rearing. He said, now you’re a teenager, and now you’ve got to start making some decisions for yourself. So if I’d say, Dad, can I go to my friend’s house and do A, B, or C? He’d often say, “Go into your bedroom, get on your knees, and ask God if you can glorify Him in this activity. If you can’t, don’t do it.”
He was teaching me the fear of God right there, right? And keeping the heart. And so, I would go upstairs, and I think I was stricter than he was, because, you know your own heart. I’m saying, “you know, I don’t know.” I think, yeah, I really can’t glorify God in this. And so I would stay away. I mean, my dad spoke into my conscience.
When I was 14, it was all different, because then I was saved, and I wanted to do this. I found it interesting what my dad did at that point. He’s saying, “you’re old enough now. I’ve trained you for 13 years. I’ve been training your conscience how to keep the heart in a variety of ways with the spiritual disciplines also. And now you start making these decisions on your own based on the Word of God.”
So that’s one aspect of it. The other aspect is really big for the Puritans, is that you keep the heart through using the spiritual disciplines—So, fellowshipping with God’s people, searching the Scriptures, attending church.
Oh, church was the highlight of their week, and how to prepare for it. They would write books on that, how to listen, how to use the sermon afterward. Just a real emphasis on the Word of God preached, but also on good books.
They would buy a book. Some wealthy man in the church would buy a book, and they’d pass it around the whole congregation. The book was almost like a week’s worth of wages, and most people couldn’t afford them. And so they would really read, and they would agree with Luther, I think. Those that had books, anyway. You know Luther’s famous statement, “most of my best friends are dead. They’re sitting on my shelves.” They would agree with that.
But they were all books that would help them fear the Lord, keep the heart, and the other word they used for it was watchfulness. Brian Hedges wrote a book for us five years ago just called Watchfulness, and it’s the only book I know of in the English language on that subject today. And you open it up, and it’s just full of the Puritans. We’ve lost the art of watchfulness, just like we’ve lost the art of meditation, and we’ve lost the art of family worship in many churches.
And for the Puritans, you see, all of this is one package: Family worship, meditation, spiritual disciplines, watchfulness, this is all a package of what they called helps to holiness, helps to sanctification. And the secret of all of this is that their idea of holiness and sanctification was generated by their idea of God, that God is holy. 1 Peter 1:15, “Be ye holy, for I am holy.”
So, their whole idea of sanctification is since God is so holy, and we’re called to be holy, we’re not doing this out of any ulterior motive. We just want to please God. We want to keep our heart. We want to be jealous, jealous against sin, and jealous for God’s glory.
Dale Johnson: I love it. I want to summarize one of the things that you said that I think is so important, where you helped us to understand how the fear of the Lord really captures the heart. It builds allegiance toward the Lord. It captivates the heart in a particular way, where it’s not just motivating the heart to pursue that which is good, but it’s also keeping the heart from that which would displease the Lord, or as you described, cause the Lord to frown.
And what a picture of that method, when we think about how we should live. It’s very practical when we think about how we should live and think about it in terms of both that positive and negative aspect—the motivation that we see.
2 Corinthians 5:14—It’s the love of Christ that compels us, motivates us, it captures us, and then it guards us in a way that maybe Philippians 4:7 would describe it. It guards our hearts and minds, because we fear and love Him and look to Him. And I think that’s what a part of what you’re describing. You mentioned spiritual disciplines.
I’m very intrigued to hear some people hear that, and they do think legalism. They might think, “Well, I’m doing something now to get something in return.” I want you to talk about how spiritual disciplines really are a process of the means of grace that the Lord has given, and that pursuing spiritual discipline really plays a huge role in helping us keep the heart and the fear of the Lord. So, describe a little bit about how these spiritual disciplines are a means of grace to us.
Joel Beeke: Yeah, well, think about it first at the human level. I love my wife like crazy. I mean, she’s a very special one. I just love her. So, I like to spend time with her. I’m a very busy man. So, we have to build into our lives some Joe and Mary time, we call it. So, what do we do? Every night at 11.30 p.m., we go for a walk outside or in a large department store if the weather is inclement. And we walk, and we talk, and we hold hands the whole way, like little high school sweethearts. And we just love it. Just love it. I wouldn’t miss that time for anything.
Is it legalistic that we do that every night? Of course not. It’s building our marriage, and we know it’s building our marriage, and we just enjoy being together. So, spiritual disciplines, far from being legalistic, is similar. I just want to enjoy being with God. And when I’m reading the Bible, I’m reading His Word. He’s speaking to me. And then I pray verse by verse as I read privately. And I read, meditate, pray, read, meditate, pray, read, meditate, pray. I’m spending time with God. This is a joy. This is not a burden.
So, it could be, I guess, considered legalistic by people who have no relationship with God and feel like they have to do it. But that’s not a Christian. That’s not, well, it could be a backsliding Christian, but that’s not what a Christian ought to be, right? So, using the spiritual disciplines as a means of grace to keep me closer to God is just a treasure. I just love using the spiritual disciplines.
Give me a newspaper, I’ll fall asleep within five minutes. Give me a good book of theology where it really speaks to the heart, it wakes me up because this is my relationship with God.
Dale Johnson: This is exciting. I love it. I want you to talk a little bit about—even maybe a personal bit—if you had to choose some of the particular spiritual disciplines, maybe two or three, that have really arrested your heart, that have been such an encouragement to you in keeping your own heart, practically speaking, fostering that depth of the fear of the Lord, the value of the treasures of the riches of knowledge found in Christ. What would those things be? And maybe give a little bit of as to why that is.
Joel Beeke: Well, certainly, number one, two, and three. number one, I probably would say would be actually reading the Puritans for the last 58 years of my life. That has done so, so much for me. They’ve kept me from my sin. They’ve built in me more desire for the Lord. I love their quotability. I love the depth of what they’re saying, the beauty of it. Yeah, so that’s number one.
Number two would probably debate whether it just be my private reading of the Bible or hearing the Bible preached to be about a tie. I know this is not the order it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be, number one, is the Bible. But see, what I like about the Puritans is on every page, you open any Puritan book, on every page, there’s like 30, 40 textual references. When I was young—I don’t do it all the time anymore, but when I was young, I used to look up every one of those references. It was like being inside the Bible.
I mean, you know, there was a lady in John Cotton’s church who kept a diary. John Cotton, the Puritan. And when she kept the diary, she came home one day and she wrote, “me thinks that Mr. Cotton, when he preaches, brings me right inside the text and makes the Bible come alive.” Okay. That’s what the Puritans do for me when I read them, make the Bible come alive.
But anyway, I love reading the Scriptures. Of course, and I love also hearing really, really good sermons that challenge me, allure me, convict me, move me to worship God. As a pastor, I would for many, many years—I don’t pastor quite as much now, but I would always have these old cassette tapes in my car, in the passenger seat. I’d have the next 40, 50 tapes lined up that I wanted to listen to. I never listened to the radio, just put in a sermon, one sermon after the other, and then meditate in between the sermons as I was driving around town.
And I had many times where I actually pulled the car off the road and just parked somewhere and just wept over the joy of what I was hearing. And it’s okay to have ministers that you really feel speak to you more than maybe most ministers. And I would pick out ministers that I really loved. And so, I think listening to sermons, hope this doesn’t sound too unconventional, from Monday through Saturday, were a primary means of grace for me.
I really had some wonderful sermons to listen to and they fed my soul. Now, not that Sunday sermons didn’t do anything for me, but those sermons—I’m all alone in the car and the preacher who acts as eloquent about the things of God were very, very dear to me.
Dale Johnson: That’s really helpful. Maybe one final thing. We talked about the fear of the Lord, keeping the heart. You mentioned John Flavel’s book, Keeping the Heart. Are there others along with that, that you would recommend that really challenges us in some of the things you’ve described today?
Joel Beeke: Heaven Taken By Storm, by Thomas Watson is all about keeping the heart through the spiritual disciplines. William Bridge, A Lifting Up for the Downcast, is all about keeping the heart in various problems in life. Not ‘don’t despair.’ Every chapter, every problem and deal. So, I don’t know if you ever read that book, but every problem, big problems, and one problem per chapter, and inevitably halfway through, he says, “so therefore, you have no reason to be discouraged whatsoever.” So, he’s helping you keep the heart. He’s helping keep you from despair.
Dale Johnson: So helpful. Very practical, brother. Thank you so much. I cannot wait. This wets the appetite so much for us to be together again in October in Fort Worth, Texas at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for our annual conference, where we’ll be talking about this practicality of the Puritans, how valuable they are to us personally, but also useful in the counseling room. And brother, thanks for bringing those to be so relevant to us today.
Joel Beeke: Thank you.
