In his book Preaching and Preachers, Dr D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote:

I shall never cease to be grateful to Richard Sibbes, who was balm to my soul at a period in my life when I was overworked and badly overtired, and therefore subject in an unusual manner to the onslaughts of the devil … I found at that time that Richard Sibbes … was an unfailing remedy. His books The Bruised Reed and The Soul's Conflict quietened, soothed, comforted, encouraged, and healed me.

Richard Sibbes (1577-1635) was one of the greatest Puritans of his age. He greatly influenced the direction and content of Puritan preaching, theology, and writing in England and America. His theology of the Holy Spirit was especially important because of its emphasis on how the Spirit operates in the daily life of the Christian. Sibbes winsomely referred to that process as 'entertaining the Spirit' in the soul. For Sibbes, that entertaining meant to nurture the friendship and hospitality of an indwelling Spirit. 'There is nothing in the world so great and sweet a friend that will do us so much good as the Spirit, if we give him entertainment,' Sibbes wrote.

Sibbes' teaching on entertaining the Holy Spirit can be divided into the following four categories:

1. the indwelling of the Spirit;
2. the sealing of the Spirit;
3. the comfort of the Spirit; and
4. grieving the Spirit.

Before exploring Sibbes' work on the Holy Spirit, let us take a brief look at who Richard Sibbes was.

Synopsis of Richard Sibbes' Life⤒🔗

Richard Sibbes was a native of Suffolk, the Puritan county of old England that furnished numerous illustrious emigrants to New England. He was born a few miles from Bury St Edmunds in 1577, the year the Lutherans drafted their Formula of Concord. He was baptized in the parish church in Thurston, where he grew up and went to school. He was the oldest of six children.

As a young child, Sibbes loved books. His father, Paul Sibbes, who was a hardworking wheelwright and (according to Zachary Catlin, a contemporary biographer of Sibbes) 'a good, sound-hearted Christian', became irritated with his son's book expenses. The father tried to cure his son of book-buying by offering him wheelwright tools. But the boy was not dissuaded. With the support of others, Sibbes was admitted to St John's College in Cambridge at the age of eighteen. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1599, a fellowship in 1601, and a master of arts degree in 1602. In 1603 he was converted under the preaching of Paul Baynes, whom Sibbes called his 'father in the gospel'. Baynes, who is remembered most for his commentary on Ephesians, succeeded William Perkins (1558-1602) at the Church of St Andrews in Cambridge.

Sibbes was ordained to the ministry of the Church of England in Norwich in 1607, was chosen as one of the college preachers in 1609, and received a bachelor of divinity degree in 1610. From 1611 to 1616 he served as lecturer at Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge. His preaching awakened Cambridge from the spiritual indifference into which it fell after the death of Perkins. A gallery had to be built to accommodate the visitors. John Cotton and Hugh Peters were converted under Sibbes' preaching. During his years at Holy Trinity, Sibbes also helped turn Thomas Goodwin from Arminianism and moved John Preston from witty preaching to plain, spiritual preaching.

Sibbes went to London in 1617 as a lecturer for Gray's Inn, the largest of the four great Inns of Court, which still remains one of the most important centres in England for the study and practice of law. In 1626 Sibbes complemented this lectureship by becoming Master of Catharine Hall (now St Catharine's College) at Cambridge. Under his leadership, the college returned to its former prestige. It graduated several men who would serve prominently at the Westminster Assembly, including John Arrowsmith, William Spurstowe, and William Strong. Soon after his appointment, Sibbes earned the doctor of divinity degree at Cambridge. He soon became known as 'the heavenly Doctor', due to his godly preaching and heavenly conversation. Izaac Walton wrote of Sibbes:

Of this blest man, let this just praise be given,
Heaven was in him, before he was in heaven.

In 1633 King Charles I offered Sibbes the vicarage of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, which was the very church Sibbes had been forced to relinquish eighteen years earlier! Sibbes continued to serve as preacher at Gray's Inn, Master of St Catharine's Hall, and Vicar of Holy Trinity until his death in 1635.

Sibbes never married, but he established an astonishing network of friendships that included a variety of godly ministers, illustrious lawyers, and parliamentary leaders of the early Stuart era. 'Godly friends are walking sermons,' he said. On thirteen occasions he wrote introductions to the writings of his Puritan colleagues.

Sibbes was a gentle and warm man who avoided the controversies of his day as much as possible. 'Factions breed fractions,' he insisted. His battles with Archbishop Laud, Roman Catholics, and Arminians were exceptions rather than the rule for him. He remained close friends with many pastors and leaders who espoused more radical reform than he did for the Church of England.

Sibbes was an inspiration to many of his brethren. He influenced Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, and Independency, the three dominant parties of the church in England at that time. He was a pastor of pastors, who lived a life of moderation. 'Where most holiness is, there is most moderation, where it may be without prejudice of piety to God and the good of others,' he wrote.

The historian Daniel Neal described Sibbes as a celebrated preacher, an educated divine, and a charitable and humble man, who repeatedly underestimated his gifts. Yet Puritans everywhere recognized Sibbes as a great Christ-centred, experiential preacher. Both learned and unlearned in upper and lower classes profited greatly from Sibbes, who was an alluring preacher.

Sibbes meant to woo. He wrote, 'To preach is to woo … The main scope of all (preaching) is, to allure us to the entertainment of Christ's mild, safe, wise, victorious government.' Sibbes brought truth home, as Robert Burns would say, 'to men's business and bosoms'. Catlin wrote of Sibbes, 'No man that ever I was acquainted with got so far into my heart or lay so close therein.'

Maurice Roberts adds,

His theology is thoroughly orthodox, of course, but it is like the fuel of some great combustion engine, always passing into flame and so being converted into energy thereby to serve God and, even more, to enjoy and relish God with the soul.

David Masson, known for his biography of John Milton, wrote, 'No writings in practical theology seem to have been so much read in the mid-seventeenth century among the pious English middle classes as those of Sibbes.' The twentieth-century historian William Haller judged Sibbes' sermons to be 'the most brilliant and popular of all the utterances of the Puritan church militant'.

Sibbes' last sermons, preached one week before his death, were expositions of John 14:2: 'In my Father's house are many mansions … I go to prepare a place for you.' When asked in his final days how his soul was faring, Sibbes replied, 'I should do God much wrong if I should not say, very well.' Sibbes' will and testament, dictated on July 4, 1635, the day before his death, commences:

I commend and bequeath my soul into the hands of my gracious Saviour, who hath redeemed it with his most precious blood, and appears now in heaven to receive it.

The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, meticulously edited with a 110-page memoir by Alexander Grosart, were published by James Nichol of Edinburgh in the 1860s and reprinted by the Banner of Truth Trust in the 1970s. Unfortunately, several of those volumes are out of print. Sibbes' most famous work, The Bruised Reed, which has done so much good in healing troubled souls, is now available in paperback from the Banner of Truth Trust.

Let us turn now to Sibbes' teaching on the entertainment of the Spirit.

The Indwelling Spirit←⤒🔗

The Spirit's indwelling is requisite to entertaining him, Sibbes said. He taught that when the Spirit of God enters the heart of a sinner, regenerating him and persuading him of the truth of the gospel, the Spirit immediately begins to live within that person. The Spirit does not draw attention to himself, however. Rather, the Spirit works to knit our hearts to God and to Jesus Christ. Sibbes wrote:

He, the Spirit, sanctifieth and purifieth, and doth all from the Father and the Son, and knits us to the Father and the Son – to the Son first, and then to the Father, because all the communion we have with God is by the Holy Ghost; all the communion that Christ as man had with God was by the Holy Ghost; and all the communion that God hath with us, and we with God is by the Holy Ghost. For the Spirit is the bond of union between Christ and us, and between God and us.

While the Father and Son perform no work without the Spirit, the Spirit also does no work apart from the Father and the Son. Sibbes explained:

As the Spirit comes from God – the Father and the Son – so he carries us back again to the Father and the Son. As he comes from heaven, so he carries us to heaven back again. The role of the Spirit is to introduce and intimately acquaint us with the Father and the Son.

Thus, if we are believers, the Spirit establishes communion between us and the other two Persons of the Trinity. It is as if he captures us and lifts us up to know the Father and the Son's love for us. The Holy Spirit lifts us to see by faith the crucified and resurrected Jesus seated in glory. That is why the Spirit comes, and that is how he functions in our lives. Therefore we may say that while, in one sense, fellowship between ourselves and God is reestablished once and for all, yet in another sense the Spirit maintains and increases that fellowship during our entire lives.

Sibbes said that as the Spirit draws us to the Father and the Son, he confirms his government in our hearts. This government is not at odds with the Spirit's purpose of revealing the things of Christ to us; rather, his internal governing reveals Jesus Christ seated on the throne of grace. Indeed, the Spirit helps us conform to the character and behaviour of Christ. The Spirit lives in us to restore and transform our souls and ripens us for glory. Submitting to the Spirit is thus critical, Sibbes said. In A Fountain Sealed, he wrote:

Let us give up the government of our souls to the Spirit. It is for our safety so to do, as being wiser than ourselves who are unable to direct our own way; it is our liberty to be under a wisdom and goodness larger than our own. Let the Spirit think in us, desire in us, pray in us, live in us, do all in us; labour ever to be in such a frame as we may be fit for the Spirit to work upon.

The believer is like a musical instrument, tuned and played by the Spirit. Sibbes wrote, 'Let us lay ourselves open to the Spirit's touch. When the Spirit has ruling sway in our lives he fine-tunes our souls much like a musical instrument, and then he plays our lives as a piano concerto before God.'

Sibbes went on to describe this process of tuning and the touch of the Holy Spirit: 'The Holy Spirit must rule; he will have the keys delivered to him. We must submit to his government, and when he is in the heart he will subdue by little and little all high thoughts, rebellious risings, and despairing fears.'

How may we know that we have this blessed, indwelling, governing Spirit? Sibbes said:

By living and moving, by actions vital, even so may a man know he hath the Spirit of God by its blessed effects in operations; it is not idle in us; but as the soul quickens the body, so doth the Spirit the soul. Every saving grace is a sign that the Spirit is within us.

Wherever the indwelling Spirit is, he gradually transforms the soul to be holy and gracious like himself. The government of the Spirit is not realized immediately. Sibbes wrote:

The revolution and overthrow of our old nature comes upon conversion, while the government of the Spirit is established only in a process as we may learn more of and abide more to the constitution of our new life in Jesus Christ.

Restored communion with God the Father and the Son by means of the government of the Spirit cannot but produce spiritual warfare. The transformation that the Holy Spirit effects in the believer is accompanied by external and internal struggle. Externally, we face the powers of darkness, even the prince of darkness himself, Sibbes warned, because the devil is profoundly envious of the man that walks in the Spirit. Satan will do all within his power to destroy that comfort.

Indeed, all spiritual graces meet with conflict, Sibbes said, 'for that which is true is so with a great deal of resistance from that which is counterfeit.' What is of the Spirit is always in conflict with what is not of the Spirit. Internally, our fleshly desires are continually at war with the Spirit, for when the Spirit comes to a person, he pulls down all strongholds. He carves out a path for himself in the thick of battle.

Our soul is the battlefield upon which the Spirit marches and he will have the final victory, Sibbes said. For wherever the Spirit dwells, he also rules, for he will not be an underling to lusts. He repairs the breaches of the soul. In this battle we must submit to the Spirit in all things, however, for only then shall we experience the victorious life that is the inheritance of believers in Jesus Christ. To be sure, the greatest battles were won on Calvary and in our hearts when we were brought to new birth, but we must also fight daily battles in our life of sanctification. Our ever-present foes – our flesh, the world, and the devil – will unceasingly strive to tear up the foundation upon which we stand as children of the Most High.

Sibbes said that we must show that we treasure the indwelling power of the Spirit. We cannot value God's love and holiness granted to us in the Spirit without exercising self-denial. Life in the Spirit, while beginning at conversion, must continue to bear fruit. As Sibbes wrote:

We may know who dwells in a house by observing who goes in and when they come out; so we may know that the Spirit dwells in us by observing what sanctified speeches he sends forth and what delight he hath wrought in us to things that are special and what price we set upon them.

The believer's greatest encouragement in spiritual warfare is the abiding presence of the Spirit. 'The Spirit is the leader and enabler of our soul,' Sibbes wrote. It is through what Sibbes termed 'the motions, or holy stirrings of the Spirit' that the Spirit enables us to overcome the sin which attacks us internally and the forces of darkness set against us externally. The Spirit of Christ is powerful and strong. Through his indwelling, we are able 'to perform duties above nature, to overcome ourselves and injuries,' Sibbes said. He added, 'He makes us to be able to live and die, to do what others cannot do, just as he enabled Christ to do things that another man could not do.'

Sibbes' conclusion was inevitable: 'Where there is no conflict, there is no Spirit of Christ at all.' In this he echoed the Apostle Paul's teaching that if you mortify the deeds of the flesh by the Spirit, you are led by the Spirit (Rom. 8:13). You then, by grace, entertain the Spirit. You befriend and show hospitality to that Spirit who gives you the victory over all enemies by faith (1 John 5:4).