It’s probably clear from the content of this blog that I love the Puritans and wish that more people would read them regularly. But I’m also realistic enough to know that without firm guidance from church leaders, that isn’t going to happen. And frankly, that isn’t going to happen for all sorts of reasons, one of which is the Puritans are hard. People are unlikely, for example, to sit down and read all 1200 pages of William Gurnall’s Christian in Compleat Armour. Never mind that the guy who wrote “Amazing Grace” said that it was the book, besides the Bible, that Christians should pay the most attention to (not his exact quote, but you get the point).
Fortunately, we don’t have to read all 1200 pages. Caving in to the American educational collapse, Banner of Truth worked with David Wilkerson to publish an abridged and modernized version in three small volumes. And while I’m usually against modernizations and abridgements, this is such a good book that even the abridgement is pretty fantastic.
The work is an exposition of Ephesians 6:10-20, exploring the “armor of God” and what it means for the life of the Christian. As all of the Puritans are, Gurnall is thorough. This first volume covers verses 10-13, exploring the call to combat, the nature of the battle, the nature of the enemy, and the attitude about the war which we ought to have.
There’s a lot that could be said about each of these points–and Gurnall says it. But one of the big takeaways for the modern Christian is that this war is an internal one against our own sin, not an external one for our nation or the culture or any such contemporary nonsense as we often hear coming from the loud voices on social media. If you and I are not fighting our own sin, we’re not living the Christian life.
This book is also eminently quotable (again: Puritan). Rather than share a bunch of samples, I’ll share one that particularly challenged me (given that I struggle with arrogance) and encourage you to go out and pick up the book and find the rest yourself:
“To humble a self-righteous saint. The saint whom Christ has redeemed at an early age needs to recognize the potential wickedness of his own heart… Really to understand the significance of the Cross in your life, you must realize that you are as great a debtor to the mercy of God as the worst of sinners. Until you accepted Christ’s pardon, the same sentence of death lay upon your soul as upon Judas’. If you have not sinned as grievously as someone else, it does not mean you are a better person; it means that God has been gracious.” (194)
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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