Essay / Theology

Every Day with God (Richard Rogers’ Seven Treatises)

richard rogers
Richard Rogers (1550-1618) was a Puritan pastor who noticed that people had lots of questions about how to live the Christian life. They asked very detailed and specific questions, but none of the devotional books available in his time gave correspondingly detailed answers. There were a few Roman Catholic books that got down to specifics, but their Catholic ideas about grace limited their real usefulness for a gospel Christian. So Rogers wrote his own guidebook for daily life under grace, the influential (but now hard to get ahold of) Seven Treatises. (Read about it here)

Rogers’ book Seven Treatises goes into great detail. Rogers is the Puritan who, when accused of being too strict, too puritanical, too precise, replied “I serve a precise God.” Here, from the fourth of the seven treatises, is his overview of how every day should be ordered toward God. I left the cute seventeenth-century spelling in place.

First, that every day we should be humbled for our sins, as through due examination of our lives by the law of God we shall see them.

2. That every day we be raised up in assured hope of the forgivenesse of them, by the promises of God in Christ.

3. That every day we prepare our hearts to seeke the Lord still, and keepe them fit and willing thereto.

4. That every day we strongly, and rersolutely arme ourselves against all evill and sinne, fearing most of all to offend God.

5. That every day we nourish our feare and love of him, and joy in him more then in any thing, and endeavour to please him in all duties, as occasion shall be offered, looking for his comming, 2 Thess. 3.5.

6. That every day our thanks be continued for benefits received, and still certainly hoped for.

7. That every day we watch and pray for steadfastnesse and constancy in all these.

8. That every day wee hold and keepe our peace with God, and so lie downe with it.

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