Who Was John Flavel? The Puritan Pastor of Dartmouth
John Flavel was an English Puritan pastor who lived from about 1628 to 1691. He spent most of his ministry in Dartmouth, a busy seaport in Devon. After 1662 the law barred him from his pulpit, so for years he preached in secret: in private homes, in the woods at night, even on a rock in a river estuary that the tide covered twice a day. He wrote warm, practical books that ordinary Christians could follow, among them The Mystery of Providence, Keeping the Heart, The Method of Grace and A Token for Mourners. They have never gone out of print.
Here's a fuller look at his life, what he taught, and where to start reading him.
A minister's son
Flavel was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, the son of a minister named Richard Flavel. His father taught him the faith at home. He went to University College, Oxford, and was ordained around 1650. His first parish was the village of Diptford in Devon.
Sorrow came early. His first wife died in childbirth, and the baby died too. Years later he wrote that the comforts he offered grieving people were things he had "proved and tasted" in his own trials. In 1656 he moved to Dartmouth, where he would stay, in one way or another, for the rest of his life.
Dartmouth and the Great Ejection
Dartmouth was full of sailors and merchants, and Flavel wrote several books with them in mind. A hearer described his preaching as plain, searching and full of comfort for troubled consciences. Many in the town were converted under it.
Then, in 1662, the Act of Uniformity required every minister to accept the Church of England's Prayer Book and order. Flavel could not do it in good conscience. He was one of about two thousand ministers put out of their churches that year. His own father was later imprisoned for nonconformity and died of the plague in prison.
Flavel kept preaching anyway. When a further law forbade ejected ministers to live within five miles of their old parish, he moved to the village of Slapton, just outside the limit, and his people came to him. He preached in woods and fields, sometimes late at night. Stories are told of him slipping through disguised and once riding his horse into the sea to escape arrest. For a while in the 1680s he took refuge in London.
He married four times; three of his wives died before him. Through all of it he kept writing. Many of his books come out of these hidden years.
Preaching again
In 1687 the king's declaration of indulgence let dissenting ministers preach in the open again, and the revolution of 1688 made that freedom secure. Flavel's congregation in Dartmouth built a meeting house, and he began preaching on Revelation 3:20, "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock." Those sermons became Christ Knocking at the Door of Sinners' Hearts. He told his people that the new liberty was a day of mercy they would answer for, and he urged them to be where Christ was working:
It is good to lie in the path of the Spirit; and there is a blessing pronounced upon them who wait continually at his gates.
Christ Knocking at the Door of Sinners' Hearts, The Presence of Christ in His Ordinances
He did not have long. In June 1691, on a visit to Exeter, he suffered a stroke and died the same day, in his early sixties.
What he taught
God's hand in every life
Flavel's best-loved book is The Mystery of Providence, published here as Divine Conduct. It's built on one verse, Psalm 57:2: "God that performeth all things for me." Flavel shows how God's providence shapes a believer's life from the womb, through family and calling and conversion, to daily bread and protection from sin. Then he teaches how to look back over your own life and trace God's hand in it.
It doth thousands of kind offices for men; but among them all, this is the chief — to lead and direct them to Christ.
Divine Conduct, Fourth Performance of Providence: The Means of Our Conversion
Keeping the heart
The Saint Indeed, better known as Keeping the Heart, opens Proverbs 4:23, "Keep thy heart with all diligence." Its first line is the most quoted thing Flavel ever wrote:
The greatest difficulty in conversion, is to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion, is to keep the heart with God.
The Saint Indeed, The Saint Indeed
He then works through twelve seasons that test the heart, from prosperity and affliction to temptation, doubt and sickness.
Christ applied to the soul
The Method of Grace explains how what Christ purchased becomes ours: through union with Christ, the preached word and the inward drawing of the Spirit. It includes his famous sermon on Christ as "altogether lovely" and a long, tender invitation to come to Christ:
The believer comes to Christ with an empty hand, not only as an undeserving, but as a hell-deserving sinner; he comes to Christ as to one that justifies the ungodly.
The Method of Grace, The Act by Which We Effectually Apply Christ to Our Own Souls, or Saving Faith
Comfort for mourners
A Token for Mourners was written for his brother-in-law and sister, whose only child died soon after Flavel's visit. Its text is Christ's word to the widow of Nain, "Weep not." Flavel doesn't forbid grief. He shows where it turns sinful, and how to bring it to God.
There is no sin in complaining to God, but much wickedness in complaining of him.
A Token for Mourners, The Signs of Immoderate Sorrow
Why he's still read
Flavel's books went through edition after edition for two hundred years. Archibald Alexander, the first professor at Princeton Seminary, said he owed more to Flavel than to any other uninspired writer. George Whitefield and Robert Murray M'Cheyne read him too.
The reason is simple. Flavel writes about real troubles: a dead child, an empty pantry, a cold heart in prayer, the fear that your faith isn't real. And he answers them with Christ and with the Bible, in a voice that sounds like a pastor sitting across the table. He's a good first Puritan for anyone who finds the others hard going.
Where to start
TheWay Library has five of his books, all free to read. Start with The Mystery of Providence or Keeping the Heart. If you're grieving, go straight to A Token for Mourners.
Our guide to John Flavel's books explains all five, and our collection of John Flavel quotes gathers his best lines. For more writers of his age, see the best Puritan books. All his books are on the John Flavel author page.