Selected Sermons (Foreword by Jared C. Wilson) E-Book

Lemuel Haynes

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Crossway Short Classics
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The Crossway Short Classics Series Presents Rare Sermons from Black Puritan Minister Lemuel Haynes Born in 1753, Lemuel Haynes was an indentured servant who grew to become a dynamic Reformed preacher. Nicknamed "The Black Puritan," he is credited as being the first African-American ordained for ministry in the United States. This addition to the Crossway Short Classics series presents some of Haynes's important yet little-known work. Selected Sermons features 4 rarely published sermons, along with a biography of Haynes. In "Universal Salvation," he preaches on the reality of hell and the character of Satan. "A Sermon on John 3:3" explores Jesus's command to be born again. "The Character and Work of a Spiritual Watchman Described" details qualifications for gospel ministers, and in "Liberty Further Extended," he presents a biblical argument against slavery and oppression. This collection of Haynes's sermons offers readers robust spiritual insight and a closer look at an extraordinary figure in church history. - Collection of Rarely Published Sermons: A unique, accessible resource for pastors and scholars - Written by Black Puritan Minister Lemuel Haynes: Includes his sermons on racial justice, regeneration, biblical qualifications for ministry, and the heresy of universalism - Part of the Crossway Short Classics Series: Other titles include The Lord's Work in the Lord's Way and No Little People; The Life of God in the Soul of Man; and Fighting for Holiness  - Includes a Foreword by Jared C. Wilson

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Selected Sermons

The Crossway Short Classics Series

The Emotional Life of Our Lord

B. B. Warfield

Encouragement for the Depressed

Charles Spurgeon

The Expulsive Power of a New Affection

Thomas Chalmers

Fighting for Holiness

J. C. Ryle

The Freedom of a Christian

Martin Luther

Heaven Is a World of Love

Jonathan Edwards

The Life of God in the Soul of Man

Henry Scougal

The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way and No Little People

Francis A. Schaeffer

Selected Sermons

Lemuel Haynes

Selected Sermons

Lemuel Haynes

Selected Sermons

Copyright © 2023 by Crossway

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

Cover image: The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images

First printing 2023

Printed in China

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-8196-0 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8199-1 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8197-7 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-8198-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Haynes, Lemuel, 1753-1833, author. 

Title: Selected sermons / Lemuel Haynes. 

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2023. | Series: The Crossway short classics series | Includes index. 

Identifiers: LCCN 2022006187 (print) | LCCN 2022006188 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433581960 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433581977 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433581984 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433581991 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Haynes, Lemuel, 1753-1833—Sermons. 

Classification: LCC BX7260.H315 A5 2023 (print) | LCC BX7260.H315 (ebook)  | DDC 230.58092 [B]—dc23/eng/20220718

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006187

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006188

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2023-01-18 02:56:36 PM

Contents

Foreword by Jared C. Wilson

Series Preface

Biography of Lemuel Haynes

Universal Salvation

A Sermon on John 3:3

The Character and Work of a Spiritual Watchman Described

Liberty Further Extended

Scripture Index

Foreword

You hold in your hands a rare gem recovered from one of the darker mines of church history, as Lemuel Haynes is perhaps the single most important American figure most Christians have never heard of. Born July 18th in 1753 to a Black man and a White woman, Haynes was abandoned by his parents in the home of a family friend who sold the infant Haynes into indentured servitude. By the providential hand of God, however, young Lemuel was placed into a Christian home, where by all accounts, including his own, he was treated as a member of the family and raised to love the things of God.1

Growing up in colonial Vermont, Haynes worked hard and studied hard, proving himself quite adept at intellectual pursuits despite being largely self-taught. He has affectionately been called a “disciple of the chimney-corner” as that is where he would spend most evenings after work reading and memorizing while other children were out playing or engaging in other diversions.

Haynes’s commitment to theology began in that chimney-corner, and eventually he was born again. Not long after his conversion, he turned his followership of Christ and his intellectual bent into a serious endeavor by writing and preaching. An oft-told anecdote about Haynes concerns a scene of family devotions at the Rose household where he was indentured. Given his adeptness at reading and his deep concern for spiritual matters, the Rose family would often ask Haynes to read a portion of Scripture or a published sermon. One night, Haynes read a homily of his own without credit (apparently the sermon on John 3:3 included in this volume). At the end, members of the family remarked at its quality and wondered, “Was that a Whitefield?” “No,” Haynes is said to have replied, “it was a Haynes.”

The few sermons we have of Lemuel Haynes prove him to be an exceptional expositor in the Puritan tradition, similar to Edwards or Whitefield though simpler than the former and more substantive than the latter. And yet, what Haynes may have lacked in eloquence compared to his contemporaries, he more than made up for in biblicism and applicational insight.

Officially licensed to preach in 1780 by the Congregational Association, Haynes soon after preached his first public sermon (on Psalm 96). He was then ordained in 1785 and would go on to receive an honorary Master of Arts degree from Middlebury College.

Haynes was a New Light revivalist and New Divinity theologian. He was also a patriot—he enlisted in the Continental Army in 1776 and marched with colonial troops to Ticonderoga, among other assignments. His military service was no mere distraction or aimless diversion but was representative of his heartfelt affection for the American experiment. His first biographer Timothy Mather Cooley thus described him by saying, “In principle he was a disciple of [George] Washington.”2

These two significant truths about Haynes’s philosophical convictions—his Puritan theology and his American patriotism—would prove to be the two most powerful motives in his life and ministry. He did not see these viewpoints as contradictory but complementary. Haynes believed, for instance, that the abolition of slavery was not just a true move of human righteousness in reflection of the real belief in the providence of God but also the truest form of faith in the American experiment.

So what kind of preacher was Lemuel Haynes? Cooley remarks, “Never did he wait to inquire whether a particular doctrine was popular. His only inquiries were, ‘Is it true? Is it profitable? Is it seasonable?’”3

As such, Haynes ought to stand as a superlative model for modern American evangelicalism—politically minded but theologically driven—as he is indeed an ideological forerunner for so many of the controversies still peppering the evangelical landscape today. For example, in his abolitionist tract “Liberty Further Extended” (published in 1776!), one can see clearly the theological and religious roots of the concern for racial justice that one finds, for instance, in Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In Haynes’s work we find a model for speaking to our divisive politico-cultural contexts today. While we no longer struggle with legalized slavery in America, we are nevertheless still torn over issues of justice, human relations, and other related concerns. At once a Christian may feel drawn toward a subgospel approach to justice issues, in which doctrine takes a back seat to human flourishing and liberation, and toward a nonapplicational theology that divorces the gospel from its social implications.

Right now in American evangelicalism we are experiencing a great balkanization, some of which involves fracture lines along issues of social justice or racial reconciliation. One would think we’d be beyond the concerns addressed in more rudimentary terms in colonial America. But here we are, perennially in the place where our ministries must take the timeless word fearlessly and pastorally into a troubled world. Haynes can be a trusted guide in this endeavor.

In many ways, Haynes could be considered a kind of American Spurgeon—a faithful preacher and pastor, beloved for decades by his church and his family, and concerned to see the implications of the gospel fleshed out in homes and in society. Like Spurgeon, Haynes had a sharp wit and an imagist approach to illustration. Like Spurgeon’s own engagement with the Downgrade Controversy, Haynes maintained a regular public debate with rising challenges to orthodoxy, including, most notoriously, the universalist Hosea Ballou. (His famous response to Ballou, allegedly preached as an impromptu counterpoint immediately after Ballou had soiled Haynes’s own pulpit with this heterodoxy, is titled “Universal Salvation” and included in this volume.) And like Spurgeon—thus unlike some of his own ministerial contemporaries—Haynes needs no modern apologies, no asterisk next to his legacy. He was a great minister of grace, worthy of great emulation.

This is why I’m so grateful for Crossway’s republishing of this criminally overlooked American prophet. For nearly two hundred years, we have received only two substantive biographies of Haynes—the first, from Timothy Mather Cooley, was published just four years after Haynes’s death, and the second, from historian John Saillant, was published in 2003 and is somewhat hard to find. The only published collection of Haynes’s works is long out of print and extremely difficult to find. And since Haynes preached from outlines, many of which were apparently lost to the times, what endures of his work is both rare and precious. So, as I said, you hold a gem in your hands.

I trust you will find in these pages a sterling intellect and a careful theology, but also a passionate preacher of the gospel utterly besotted with the glory of God. Read and give thanks to God for Lemuel Haynes, and pray with me that the Lord will continue to raise up many more men of his kind.

Jared C. Wilson

Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

1  This foreword is adapted from Jared C. Wilson, “Lemuel Haynes and the Right Preaching of Justice,” For the Church (blog), March 15, 2021, https://ftc.co/. Used by permission.

2  Timothy Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of Rev. Lemuel Haynes (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837), 169.

3  Cooley, Sketches, 79.

Series Preface

John Piper once wrote that books do not change people, but paragraphs do. This pithy statement gets close to the idea at the heart of the Crossway Short Classics series: some of the greatest and most powerful Christian messages are also some of the shortest and most accessible. The broad stream of confessional Christianity contains an astonishing wealth of timeless sermons, essays, lectures, and other short pieces of writing. These pieces have challenged, inspired, and borne fruit in the lives of millions of believers across church history and around the globe.

The Crossway Short Classics series seeks to serve two purposes. First, it aims to beautifully preserve these short historic pieces of writing through new high-quality physical editions. Second, it aims to transmit them to a new generation of readers, especially readers who may not be inclined or able to access a larger volume. Short-form content is especially valuable today, as the challenge of focusing in a distracting, constantly moving world becomes more intense. The volumes in the Short Classics series present incisive, gospel-centered grace and truth through a concise, memorable medium. By connecting readers with these accessible works, the Short Classics series hopes to introduce Christians to those great heroes of the faith who wrote them, providing readers with representative works that both nourish the soul and inspire further study.

Readers should note that the spelling and punctuation of these works have been lightly updated where applicable. Scripture references and other citations have also been added where appropriate. Language that reflects a work’s origin as a sermon or public address has been retained. Our goal is to preserve as much as possible the authentic text of these classic works.

Our prayer is that the Holy Spirit will use these short works to arrest your attention, preach the gospel to your soul, and motivate you to continue exploring the treasure chest of church history, to the praise and glory of God in Christ.