Competent to Minister

Caring for Souls Inside and Out 79
Love not the world, neither the things that are in
the world. If any man love the world, the love of
the Father is not in him. For all that is in the
world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the
eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but
is of the world. And the world passeth away, and
the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God
abideth for ever (1 John 2:15-17).
Anything in the world or in the world’s systems can
become an idol of the heart.
The Reformers considered all disobedience to God to
be idolatry of the heart. Puritan ministers had a keen
interest in identifying idols of the heart. They desired to
be holy and to make all believers under their care holy.
It was not enough for them to get rid of external sin.
They believed it was their duty to cure hearts by getting
rid of the idols. To do so, they would spend much time
examining the spiritual condition of individual souls.
Through various questions they attempted to discover
whether an individual was indeed saved. Then they
would seek to uncover secret sins and expose the idols
of the heart. Some even thought they could chart the
progression of each person’s soul and determine which
point along the way to maturity the person had
reached. In his book titled A History of Pastoral Care in
America: From Salvation to Self-Realization, E. Brooks
Holifield says:
Pious New Englanders, especially, wanted to learn
how to map their progress, and the Puritan
pastors became masters of introspection, cartographers
of the inner life, adept at recognizing the
signs of salvation. 1
In their zeal for holiness, they sought to go right to
the core, to those inner depths of the soul.
The Puritan pastor, especially in the seventeenth
century, became a specialist in the cure of the idolatrous
heart. He analyzed motives, evaluated feel-