It was a watershed day in the life of Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680). He was twenty years old, a student at Cambridge in England. In the words of one biographer, Thomas had been dividing his time between “making merry and becoming a celebrity preacher.” From an early age, he aspired to become a preacher famous for his great wit in the pulpit.
Thomas attended a funeral on the afternoon of October 2, 1620, that affected him deeply. It precipitated a seven-year period of gloomy introspection. He wrestled with whether he was good enough to merit salvation. Would he continue to depend on himself or learn to trust Christ? The counsel of a seasoned pastor urged him “to live by faith in Christ and derive from him life and strength for sanctification and all comfort and joy in believing.” Something in what the old preacher said found its mark in Thomas. He was liberated by the assurance that he was saved grace, not by any attempts on his side to win favor with God. He learned, in his own words, “not to trust my salvation to improvements but to fix my eyes on Jesus.”
Thomas became a leading Puritan of his day. People called them Puritans because they sought to “purify” the Church of England. He paid a heavy price for his Puritan sympathies; he was removed as college president and forced into exile. Goodwin was an intellectual heavyweight with a warm heart for God. His writings filled twelve volumes (he wrote nine hundred pages on Ephesians alone) and influenced future generations of leading Puritans. He wrote several tutorials as an aid to prayer. Two of his quotes on prayer stand out to me: “Those blessings are sweetest that are won with prayer and worn with thanks” and “Our prayers are granted as soon as we have prayed, even though the process of fulling our requests has not yet begun.”
I love this prayer from our Puritan forebears. Something in the way they prayed challenge me to go deeper in prayer: