As a type-A, calendar and to-do list kind of person, I like to remember that those who plan act a little like God.

We resemble, in some small measure, the Maker who built his world from a six-day blueprint. We share a likeness with him who “planned from days of old what now I bring to pass” (2 Kings 19:25). We embody in creaturely form the ways of him who acts beyond whim, against randomness, and always according to a “definite plan” (Acts 2:23). We are made in the image of a planning God, and those who plan act a little like him.

But wait a minute. As a type-A, calendar and to-do list kind of person, I need to remember something else too: sometimes, those who plan act a little too much like God.

Sometimes, we plan as if we were not vapor and mist, flower and grass, here by morning and gone by night. Sometimes, we reduce planning to prayerless reason and pro-con lists, tools of self-reliant minds. Sometimes, we don’t even say under our breath, “If the Lord wills . . .” (James 4:15). We are made in the image of a planning God, and those who plan sometimes take the image and forget the God.

So, as another calendar closes, and a year of blank days falls open before us, how might we reflect our planning God without planning as if we were God?

1. Plan like a mortal.

Whenever we plan, whether for next year or next week, we bring something of tomorrow into today. We run ahead on the trail of time, charting courses and planting flags, considering what we might do now to reach goals then. In the process, however, our imagined tomorrows can feel more real than they really are; we can find our hearts already inhabiting our future plans. But as James reminds us, we “do not know what tomorrow will bring.” We are “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14). We are mortal.

Partly because eternity rests in our bones, and partly because lingering folly does too, we often fail to plan like mortals. We are mists who dream like mountains, lilies who plot like oaks. As we mentally walk the trails of tomorrow, deciding where we’ll go and what we’ll do, we forget that such trails may never be. Humility gives way to type-A “arrogance” (James 4:16).

Rightly felt, a sense of our mortality does not discourage planning, but it does chasten and reframe planning. When eternity presses close, we live (and plan) more wisely in time. We also remember what our best plans really are: drawings and rough drafts, penciled sketches at the mercy of God’s eraser. So, even as we think and scheme and dream as if we may have months or years ahead, we stamp every plan with mortal wisdom: “If the Lord wills” — and not otherwise — “we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15).

2. Plan like a child.

Pride can take several shapes in our planning. It can appear in our quickness to say, “I will . . .” rather than “If the Lord wills . . .” It can appear also in a prayerless reliance on our own reason.

I often need help remembering that Christian planning is never a matter of mere common sense. Of course, common sense holds great value (as much of Proverbs testifies), and most of us could stand to have more. But our world is too complex a place for pro-con lists to master. More than that, God’s own priorities are often too counterintuitive for worldly wisdom to trace.

Planners like me would do well to heed the words of John Newton: “It is a great thing indeed to have the spirit of a little child, so as to be habitually afraid of taking a single step without leading” (Letters of John Newton, 184). We are not only mortals — our time short, our days numbered. We are also children — our wisdom small, our foresight fallible. So, as those who know our own ignorance, who sense our utterly limited perspective and our proneness to plausible folly, we plan in the presence of God. We saturate planning with prayer.

We might, for example, root our planning in Paul’s prayer for the Philippians:

It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. (Philippians 1:9–10)

Rightly done, planning is a way of looking at the competing claims for our time and attention, and approving not only what is good or worthy, but “what is excellent,” what is best. And approving what is best calls for more than common sense. We need nothing less than abounding, discerning love, a gift that comes from the Spirit in response to prayer.

3. Plan like a worshiper.

Praying as we plan may guard us from the pride that James warns so strongly against (James 4:16). But what about the next day, the next week, the next month, when we wake up with plan in hand, calendar filled, to-do list ready? How will we protect ourselves, in an ongoing way, from acting like immortal adults rather than mortal children? We can plan like worshipers.

Worshipers remember that, among all priorities, “one thing is necessary” (Luke 10:42). Among all requests, “one thing have I asked of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4). Among all ambitions, “one thing I do” (Philippians 3:13). Sit at Jesus’s feet. Behold his beauty. Press on toward heaven.

Worshipers not only saturate their planning with prayer; they also plan to saturate their days with prayer (and God’s other means of grace). Pursuing God becomes one of the main parts of their plans. What will Bible reading look like this year? When, where, and how will I commune with God in prayer? In what ways will I deepen my fellowship with brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers in my local church?

“Above all priorities, prioritize worship. At the heart of all plans, plan to pursue God.”

When we daily pursue God according to a prayerful, thoughtful plan, we will have a harder time taking our to-do lists too seriously. God’s providence, not our plans, will seem like our great unshakable guide. We will also find ourselves more attuned to when our priorities should change. As we seek him, the discerning love of God will often lead us to approve some excellence other than the one we had planned.

So, above all priorities, prioritize worship. At the heart of all plans, plan to pursue God.

4. Plan like a dreamer.

Can creatures of dust craft five-year visions? Can mists like us dare to imagine not just tomorrow but a thousand tomorrows? As long as we live like mortals, pray like children, and pursue God like worshipers, yes, we can. And indeed, sometimes love will compel us to do so. God created us “in Christ Jesus for good works” (Ephesians 2:10), and some good works are so wonderfully audacious, so beautifully complex, they reach beyond the pages of this year’s calendar.

Consider a remarkable passage near the end of Romans, where Paul outlines his travel plans:

I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. (Romans 15:24–26)

In a time when traveling from Achaia to Jerusalem to Rome to Spain would have taken months and perhaps years, Paul outlines a surprisingly complicated, long-range plan. Of course, we know from Acts that Paul remained sensitive to God’s redirecting hand (Acts 16:6–10, for example), but he did not for that reason stop planning. With Christlike love burning in his heart, he set his sights across years and seas.

Some good works call for far-seeing vision, bold ambition, and the willingness to embark on a path whose end lies over the horizon. Global missions and church planting are two such good works. We could mention many others: adopting children, evangelizing a city, starting a God-glorifying business, ending abortion, even raising a child in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Often in Scripture we find the wicked laying wicked plans (Esther 8:3; Psalm 21:11; 33:10; 62:4). Will not the righteous lay counter-plans for righteousness? Will we not think on our beds, and dream with open calendars, and dare to fill future days with penciled plans for good?

5. Plan like a sub-planner.

Perhaps the best test of a planner’s heart comes later, outside the moment of planning, when we realize that God’s plans were different from ours. “Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand” (Proverbs 19:21). And sometimes, even often, the purpose of the Lord undoes our plans.

Our God is the great intervener, the great redirector, the one who “frustrates the plans of the peoples” (Psalm 33:10) and who sometimes, for kind and wise reasons, frustrates our own plans as well. Our wisdom in such moments is to receive the frustration of our plans without frustration, to hold our torn to-do lists with humble, trusting hands — and in the more trivial cases, maybe with even a self-deprecating laugh.

Every ruined plan is an opportunity to remember that we are sub-planners, planners with a lowercase p. God gives us the dignity of dreaming — and sometimes too the gift of seeing dreams come true. But above that dignity, he gives the assurance that even when our plans fail, he folds the failures into his own plans for our good (Romans 8:28).

So far as we know, Paul never made it to Spain. And so with us, some of our most seemingly God-glorifying plans will not come to pass. But those crossed-out hopes, those unchecked boxes on our to-do lists, have the potential to push us deeper into our mortal creed: “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15). They can bid us to say with more sincerity, “Not my plans, but yours, be done.” Best of all, they can teach us to receive God’s interruptions as better than our best-laid plans.

ABSTRACT: The two major positions on lying (lying as communicating contrary to neighbor love and lying as communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows), while offering helpful insights, do not fully account for the biblical data. A Christian ethic of truth-telling begins by defining truthfulness and lying in conformity with God’s character as the primary principle, allowing the previous emphases on love for neighbor and conformity to thought to function as regulating principles.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Daniel R. Heimbach (PhD, Drew University Graduate School), retired senior research professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, to explain how Christians have approached the ethics of truth-telling and to assess how those positions align with the complexity of biblical testimony.

Augustine once said, “Whether we should ever tell a lie if it be for someone’s welfare is a question that has vexed even the most learned.”1 And that is because, while the Bible shows that God demands truthfulness (Exodus 20:16; Zechariah 8:16; Ephesians 4:25), it also shows that God expects less than complete candor in some circumstances (1 Samuel 16:1–5; 2 Kings 6:14–20), that he uses lies for divine purposes (1 Kings 22:19–23; 2 Thessalonians 2:11), and that he commends people who demonstrate faithfulness to God by misleading enemies of God (Joshua 2:4–6; Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25).

These anomalies have led Christians to formulate two quite contrary positions on how best to interpret what the Bible says on the ethics of truth-telling: the first, formulated by the early church, views lying as communicating contrary to neighbor love; the second, first formulated by Augustine, views lying as communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows.2

The first position holds that communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows is sometimes right and true, because what makes communicating wrong and untrue is betraying a relational trust. According to this tradition, communicating in ways driven by neighbor love is right and true even if one’s words do not always align with what one thinks or knows is true.

The second position holds that communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows is necessarily wrong because inconsistency between what is communicated and what one believes to be true is always wrong. According to this tradition, speaking in line with what one thinks or knows is always right, even at the cost of betraying good people and allowing bad people to do wicked things.

I believe both traditionally held positions are partially right but also fall short of what the whole word of God says about communicating faithfully. In this essay, I aim first to review what the Bible says on this important subject and then argue for a position that helps resolve some of the tension between the traditionally held views.

Six Observations from Scripture

We can make at least six important observations concerning what the Bible says about communicating truthfully and being true.

1. God is the standard of truth.

First, the word of God identifies speaking truthfully with God and speaking untruthfully with opposition to him. God declares, “I the Lord speak the truth; I declare what is right” (Isaiah 45:19). God not only speaks truthfully but is the source and measure of truth. God is essentially “righteous and true” (Deuteronomy 32:3–4 CSB). He does not measure up to truth but rather is Truth Itself. When the Bible says God is “the God of truth” (Isaiah 65:16), it means not just that he is truthful, but that he is the standard to which everything true aligns.

Thus, everything God says is necessarily true (2 Samuel 22:31; Psalm 119:160), everything he reveals is necessarily true (Proverbs 30:5), everything he does accords with truth (Deuteronomy 32:4; Psalm 25:10; 145:17), and he can never be untrue (Numbers 23:19; Titus 1:2). When God says he delights in truth (Psalm 51:6) and commands us to speak truthfully (Zechariah 8:16; Ephesians 4:25), he calls us to be like him (Leviticus 19:2; 1 Peter 1:16).

2. The Bible sometimes commends misleading speech.

Second, while the Bible stresses the sanctity of truth and condemns what is untrue, it also includes passages in which communicating contrary to what is known so as to mislead bad people is treated either without disapproval or with commendation.

The Hebrew midwives deceive Pharaoh to save babies (Exodus 1:15–21).
Rahab deceives a king to save spies (Joshua 2:1–7; 6:17, 25; Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25).
God orders Israel to ambush the men of Ai (Joshua 8:3–8).
Jael deceives the Canaanite general Sisera (Judges 4:18–21; 5:24–27).
God develops a cover story to deceive Saul (1 Samuel 16:1–5).
Michal deceives Saul to protect David (1 Samuel 19:12–17).
David tells Jonathan to cover his absence by deceiving Saul (1 Samuel 20:6); Jonathan then deceives Saul to protect David (1 Samuel 20:28–29).
David deceives Ahimelech the priest about the mission he is on (1 Samuel 21:2).
David deceives the people of Gath by feigning madness (1 Samuel 21:13).
David deceives Achish about where he was raiding (1 Samuel 27:10).
David deceives Achish about his real allegiance (1 Samuel 29:8–9).
David tells Hushai to deceive Absalom by giving bad advice (2 Samuel 15:34); Hushai then deceives Absalom this way (2 Samuel 17:5–13), and God ensures Absalom is ruined by Hushai’s deceitful advice (2 Samuel 17:14).
A woman deceives Absalom’s men to save David’s men (2 Samuel 17:19–20).
Elisha deceives Syrians sent to arrest him (2 Kings 6:14–20).
Jeremiah deceives people to keep secret God’s message to Zedekiah (Jeremiah 38:24–27).
God says he will himself deceive false prophets (Ezekiel 14:9).

In these passages, bad people are misled, and Scripture treats these episodes either as if nothing wrong happened or as if the deceptions were good. While God never is false and never wants us to be, the Bible shows that God sometimes wants good people to mislead bad people.

3. God’s speech fits the worthiness of the recipient.

Third, God himself is not always straightforward. In several places, the Bible refers to God sending “a lying spirit” or “strong delusion” by which bad people are led to think and believe something untrue (1 Kings 22:19–23; 2 Chronicles 18:20–22; 2 Thessalonians 2:11). In such scenarios, theologians debate whether God uses the sinfulness of bad people against them or whether he deceives them himself. However these passages are interpreted, Psalm 18:25–26 indicates that God adjusts how he communicates to fit the worthiness of those addressed.

There David says, “With the merciful you show yourself merciful; with the blameless man you show yourself blameless; with the purified you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you make yourself seem [something else].”3 Translators struggle with that last word. The Christian Standard Bible and the New International Version use “shrewd,” the English Standard Version uses “tortuous,” the New American Standard Bible uses “astute,” the King James Version uses “unsavory,” and the New Revised Standard Version uses “perverse.” No English word easily captures what it means.

“The Bible never separates communicating truly with being true.”

But the core idea is plain: God communicates clearly with people who want to hear and accept what is true, and he communicates in ways hard to grasp when speaking with people who do not want to hear and accept what is true. Some people, it would seem, are not worthy of receiving clear communication. Nothing God says is untrue (Psalm 25:10), but he adjusts how he communicates to fit the worthiness of those to whom he speaks.

4. God’s ways transcend our comprehension.

Fourth, the Bible insists God’s ways are beyond human ability to fully comprehend. God is infinite. Everything he does or says has dimensions transcending human comprehension. For God, communicating truly is not the same as communicating exhaustively (and that is true for us as well). So, when interpreting what the Bible says about the ethics of faithful communication, we accept what we read, even if it does not fit what we expect or what we think it should say.

So, if someone explains the biblical truth ethic in a manner that makes perfect sense to us, we do well to suspect either that the explanation is wrong or that it distorts how God defines truth-telling in some way. When Scripture says, “God is not man, that he should lie” (Numbers 23:19), it suggests that God’s definition of truth and the truth ethic is not affected by human conventions and that none of the ways humans define or interpret truth-telling on their own are entirely correct.

5. Truth is practiced, not just spoken.

Fifth, the Bible never separates communicating truly from being true. God not only communicates truly but is Truth Itself. He is the essence, measure, origin, and definer of truth. He is the one without which nothing is true. As we communicate truly, we become more godly; as we become more godly, we communicate more truly.

First John 1:6 expresses this reality: “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” John later adds that “when [Jesus] appears we shall be like him,” and “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:2–3). In other words, the truth ethic is something practiced, not just verbalized.

6. Communicating accurately is sometimes wrong.

Sixth, in two places the Bible treats communicating accurately as morally wrong. The first is where Doeg the Edomite betrays David (1 Samuel 22:9–10), and the second is where Judas Iscariot betrays Jesus (Matthew 26:21–25). Each speaks in line with what he has in mind and states facts accurately, and yet the way each speaks is viewed as untrue in the sense of being morally wrong.

As James explains, communicating truthfully the way God defines it depends more on a speaker’s heart condition than on mere self-consistency or neighborliness. “If you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. . . . For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice” (James 3:14, 16). A bad heart can make what one says ethically false even if it is factually correct, aligns with what one thinks, and is considered neighborly in some way.

Anthropocentric Divide

Although both traditional explanations are able to account for some of the above observations, neither has been able to draw all of them into a coherent ethic of truth-telling. The reason seems to be that both approach the matter from an anthropocentric posture. One measures truth by consistency with human neighbors and the other by consistency with what a person has in his own mind.

By contrast, the Bible treats truthful communication in a theocentric manner and assumes that anything else distorts the biblical norm. Thus, in order to account for all six observations, we could describe lying not as communicating contrary to neighbor love or communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows, but as communicating contrary to God. This third position understands that what biblically true communication requires cannot be grasped apart from God. In this view, truth is not something by which we measure God, but something by which God measures us.

Division between the inherited traditions reduces to different ways of conceiving the wrong that occurs in untrue communication. If truthfulness means preserving relational trust (position one), the wrong of untruth occurs in betraying a trust relationship, as measured by others trusting us. If truthfulness means accurate alignment of words with thoughts (position two), the wrong of untruth arises in discord between them. If truthfulness means fulfilling a mission assigned by God (position three), however, the wrong of untruth occurs in hindering a divine mission or purpose, however words align with thoughts and however they affect those trusting us for their own reasons.

The main difference between the first and second positions has to do with how communicating truly and lying are defined. What Christians held before Augustine was not precise, but they generally aligned communicating truly with neighbor love, thus making it relational. During the early years of persecution before Constantine (AD 35–313), they justified communicating contrary to thought in order to save innocent people. The weakness of this approach is that neighbor love can be interpreted in subjectively sentimental terms.4

Augustine meant to purge the church from ethical relativity and generally did so by applying Scripture. But when it came to interpreting the sanctity of truth, he started with definitions of truthfulness and lying that came from Greek philosophy and not actually from the Bible itself. Thus, neither of the traditions dividing Christian ethics on this point actually defines truthful communication in biblically grounded, God-centered terms.

Theocentric Solution

Although Christianity has historically been divided on the ethics of truth-telling, God’s ethical reality is not. The coherence of God demands a single, coherent answer, and there are just three possibilities: (1) lying as communicating contrary to neighbor love; (2) lying as communicating contrary to what one thinks or knows; or (3) a category that transcends both — one that defines truthfulness and lying in ways that are neither neighbor-focused nor self-focused, but rather God-focused.

Ultimate Truth is a person (John 14:6); therefore, the sanctity of truth is ultimately personal and relational, not abstract and impersonal — not a concept, principle, or rule standing off by itself over and against God. All truly true truth comes from, relates to, and serves God (Romans 11:36); therefore, the obligation to communicate truly and to be true reduces to fidelity to God. In other words, moral communication primarily concerns fidelity to the One who is Truth Itself.

How this communication relates to neighbors, thoughts, or facts is secondary. While fidelity to our neighbors, our own thoughts, and to facts makes good sense, this fidelity is not an absolute in its own right. What it means and requires in any given situation depends on what the word of God says. After all, God is he who “[declares] what is right” (Isaiah 45:19), and fearing God is the only way to avoid “perverse speech” (Proverbs 8:13 CSB).

Jesus declares that he is himself “the truth” (John 14:6), and John says he is “full of . . . truth” (John 1:14). Jesus did not measure up to any humanly conceived notion of truth. Rather, being God, he was and is the source, measure, and end of everything true, including truthful speaking. He is not an instance of truth conceived in terms other than himself, but rather is Truth Itself.

When Jesus said, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice,” Pilate asked, “What is truth?” (John 18:37–38). Pilate understood Jesus to be saying something momentous. Jesus was claiming that all true communication and being true, all accuracy and meaning, all genuinely reliable existence, behavior, understanding, and conveying of information one to another is of and through himself — and that conceiving otherwise is false.

The lying as communicating contrary to God position subordinates, but does not discard, the traditional positions. It allows the other positions to serve subordinate roles. That is, loving neighbors and self-consistency can be viewed as regulating principles pointing toward what faithful communication most often requires. Pleasing Christ is the only absolute governing the biblical truth ethic. The regulating principles tell us what that ethic usually requires. But where the word of God says otherwise, we must follow. The primary principle of cohering to God himself supersedes the regulating principles of loving neighbors and self-consistency.

In the Bible, obligation to communicate truly and be true has two dimensions: one vertical in relation to God and one horizontal in relation to others. Communicating truly and being true involves both God and others. They are unconditional in relation to God, but they are conditional in relation to others, always depending on how they affect fidelity to God. The Bible refers to this condition as “the fear of God.”

Scripture tells us that “to fear the Lord is to hate . . . perverse speech” (Proverbs 8:13 CSB), and then it also tells us the Hebrew midwives and Rahab communicated as they did because they “feared” God (Exodus 1:17–21; Joshua 2:9–11). Because of this, and because Scripture regards the act by which Rahab protected the spies as a good example of faith pleasing to God (Hebrews 11:31), we should stop treating these accounts as “difficult” and should instead accept them as places where God explains how the way he defines communicating truly and being true differs from what we expect.

God uses these accounts to show that communication must be unconditionally true and faithful to himself and conditionally true and faithful to anyone or anything else. The midwives and Rahab demonstrated truthful communication the way God defines it.

The God Who Is Truth

Ethics is, at heart, a matter of worship that leaves two options. We can worship God or some guise of the devil; there is no middle ground. “Whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4). We communicate either in step with God or in step with the devil. Conceiving of truth any other way skews or ignores the essential ethical questions at the heart of all truly true truth: “True by what measure?” or “True to whom?”

You cannot be true to the devil and to Christ at the same time, and you cannot communicate truly with both, in reference to both, or with the emissaries of both at the same time. Fidelity to ultimate truth requires infidelity to ultimate falsehood. Which is to say, communicating truly comes from Christ (1 Peter 3:15–16), and communicating untruly comes from hell (James 3:6).

This third position resolving the divide between self-consistency and neighbor love agrees with Allen Verhey’s caution: “God is Truth, but truth is not a second god.”5 There is a connection between God and truth, but it is not reciprocal. What we know of truth says something of God. But what we think of truth does not define God. Our understanding of truth does not limit God; at best, it only reflects God. To know truth truly, one must focus on God as he has revealed himself. Faithful communication depends on him and centers on him, not on us.

This study of the truth ethic reveals how God’s ordering of ethical reality is at once highly complex and united by a deep simplicity centered on God himself. It also demonstrates the paradoxical nature of revealed ethics. The biblically revealed ethic of communicating truly and being true, while consistent, absolute, universal, and unvarying, also runs contrary to human expectations. It is not self-contradictory but has marks of a mind transcending our own. It is not what most people think because it is more complex, deeper, and measured by a higher standard than most expect.

Yet at the same time, it is easy enough for anyone believing in the One who transcends human understanding to grasp, plain enough to convict sinners of deserved judgment, and sufficient to guide what we say and do in all situations arising in this fallen, fallible world.

Some books have a strange and unanticipated ability to capture people’s attention and exceed all expectations in the number of copies they sell. That has certainly been the case with The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions. Over the almost fifty years since it was first printed, demand for this little resource has not only steadily increased but has often come from some unlikely quarters.

Given that the label “Puritan” often has pejorative connotations — even in some Christian circles — why has this anthology of Puritan prayers managed to bless such a broad cross section of the church for so many decades?

Puritan Rediscovery

The answer lies in some measure with the story of how the Banner of Truth came into existence. In the postwar years in Britain, largely through the influence of men like D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and J.I. Packer, many rediscovered the Puritans and their writings with a fresh appreciation of what Packer once described as “Christianity of an older, deeper, richer, riper sort.”

During the seventeenth century in England, the Puritans served as heirs of the Protestant Reformation. They both preserved and built on the theological legacy of men like Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli. They also maintained the rich piety that marked that crucial era in church history — a piety rooted in the conviction that, as Paul says in Titus, “knowledge of the truth . . . leads to godliness” (Titus 1:1 NIV).

The Puritans were first and foremost pastor-teachers who sought not merely to educate and inform their congregations but to see their lives transformed by God’s word and Spirit. They were Bible men through and through, and the impact of their ministries was plain to see in the congregations they served. They wrote prolifically, and much of their writing simply offered in print what they taught and proclaimed from their pulpits week by week. This multipronged ministry led to the penetrating application of great Bible truths worked out in the everyday experience of their people.

It was hardly surprising, then, that the legacy of these men lived on through their books in the centuries that followed, with notable figures like George Whitefield being influenced by them and, in turn, being used by God in significant measure in their own days. However, with the dilution of evangelical convictions and the rise of liberal theology in the nineteenth century, the influence of the Puritans began to wane — that is, until their works were rediscovered in the aftermath of the Second World War.

In that surprising context, a new generation of preachers began to benefit from these classic works. Iain Murray was one of those young men, and he, along with like-minded friends, helped stir up fresh interest in the Puritan legacy.

Roots of a Classic

This was the soil into which The Valley of Vision sunk its roots. Through Murray’s contacts at that time and his early work with what would become The Banner of Truth, he encountered Arthur Bennett, an Episcopalian minister. When he came across Bennett’s writings on the life and work of David Brainerd (a close friend of Jonathan Edwards and missionary to the Delaware Indians in New Jersey during the eighteenth century), Murray sent Bennett some examples of Puritan prayers and suggested not only that he might find them helpful, but also that he might consider editing and abridging some of them to bring them back into circulation for the church.

The outcome of these interactions was an effort not merely to republish these prayers from the past but also to use them as a template for a book more suited to a new generation of Christians. In Murray’s words, they planned to use these Puritan prayers as “a source for a book in more modern form, taking thoughts, petitions, and, at times, even language, recast, and all more natural to [our] own prayer life today.” They hoped to create not only a record of the past but even “more a devotional work to aid Christians in their communion with God in the present day” (as the preface to the 1975 edition says).

In God’s providence, Bennett’s predecessor in his parish in Hertfordshire was Rev. E. Bickersteth, a gifted evangelical Anglican poet and hymn writer. Bickersteth clearly influenced Bennett and his work in compiling his devotional anthology.

Prayers for Every Season

The beauty of this collection of prayers is multifaceted, traversing the entire scope of the Christian journey from the depths to the heights. The prayers express the deep desires of the heart and the perplexities of our Christian experience in language full of deep reverence for God on the one hand and, on the other hand, a down-to-earth sense of our needs, longings, and failings. Through them all, there is the rich gospel realization that, despite our manifold sins and transgressions — through omission as much as commission — the grace of God in Christ is more than sufficient for our guilt, and the aid of the Holy Spirit is more than equal to our human weakness.

The prayers are organized topically. They begin, quite appropriately, with an acknowledgment of the Holy Trinity — eternally one God in three persons. What follows is a sequence of prayers that both savor God’s triune glory and celebrate the benefits that belong to us through our union and communion with God in Christ. From there, the prayers cover the nature of our salvation — its grounds and benefits — and our communion with God as we grow in grace.

An entire section of prayers expresses our daily need of penitence as one of the hallmarks of genuine conversion. In addition, other sections offer prayers for our spiritual needs and prayers to remind us of the various privileges we enjoy: our access to God in prayer, the gifts God lavishes upon us as his children (which we so easily undervalue), and the calling we have as disciples of Christ. Another section relates to the work of the ministry (but which can be prayed by all Christians for their own pastors). The closing section takes a heaven’s-eye view of the challenges and struggles we face in daily life. This little volume contains, quite literally, “a prayer for all seasons of life.”

Awake to God

Those of us who belong to this present era — some fifty years after this rich devotional resource was compiled — might find its language and form somewhat alien to what we are used to. Whether we try using the prayers in our own personal prayer life or in public prayer, their style and tone may sound quaint. Even still, we should not allow this impression to put us off.

The very fact that their style, tone, and content take us out of our often-thoughtless comfort zones should give us pause for thought. Not least because, when we reflect on the tone as much as the content of these expressions of praise and petition, we realize they convey an affectionate regard for God’s glory, holiness, and beauty too often absent in our own day.

In that sense, this collection of prayers from a different era in the church’s history reflects a depth of communion with God and an awareness of his glory and attributes that many churches of our time lack. The Valley of Vision, then, may become for us what it has become for so many: a time-honored aid to cultivating our daily appreciation of God and our moment-to-moment need of him.