"The Reformed Pastor", Richard Baxter

Richard Baxter [1615-1691] was a Puritan pastor known for his shepherd's heart. His best known work is The Reformed Pastor, which I have been absolutely enjoying to the max. What a great book! Once you get beyond the Puritan propensity for repetition [not a bad thing in making sure a point sticks], this book is a gem. I was surprised to find out "reformed" did not mean what I thought it did - he's really talking about "the regenerate pastor", to whom the book is addressed.

Though not a pastor, I am finding his exhortations are applicable to all believers to a certain extent. That is the spirit in which I have been going through the book - with a big finger pointed back at ME. I am most convicted about what he has to say about evangelism and most encouraged by what he has to say about the seriousness and effort one must take in studying God's Word. Here's an excerpt:

"So great a God, whose message we deliver, should be honoured by our delivery of it...Do not reason and conscience tell you, that if you dare venture on so high a work as this, you should spare no pains to be qualified for the performance of it? It is not now and then an idle snatch or taste of studies that will serve to make an able and sound divine. I know that laziness hath learned to allege the vanity of all our studies, and how entirely the Spirit must qualify us for, and assist us in our work; as if God commanded us the use of means, and then warranted us to neglect them; as if it were his way to cause us to thrive in a course of idleness, and to bring us to knowledge by dreams when we are asleep, or to take us up into heaven, and show us his counsels, while we think of no such matter, but are idling away our time on earth! O, that men should dare, by their laziness, to 'quench the Spirit,' and then pretend the Spirit for the doing of it!...God hath required us, that we be 'not slothful in business,' but 'fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.' Such we must provoke our hearers to be, and such we must be ourselves. O, therefore, brethren, lose no time! Study, and pray, and confer, and practise; for in these four ways your abilities must be increased. Take heed to yourselves, lest you are weak through your own negligence, and lest you mar the work of God by your weakness."