Thomas Brooks as a puritan preacher and a Navy chaplain in the 1600s, serving in London, England for many years. Many of his works are available online for free or very inexpensive. An excellent collection is available here: Thomas Brooks.
In his farewell sermon, he purposed to leave his congregation with a charge to pursue lasting, godly legacies. That is, individually and corporately, what commitments will leave a lasting impact. Interestingly, a legacy can also be defined as an amount of money or property left to someone in a will (Oxford Languages, "Legacy"). This Puritan Pastor left spiritual property to help his congregation make a lasting impact before they departed from this world.
What follows are the 27 legacies from Thomas Brooks, preached in 1662. They can be found the "The Complete Works of Thomas Brooks." The italicized words are my own brief commentary.
1. Secure your interest in Christ; make it your great business, your work, your heaven, to secure your interest in Christ. This is not an age, an hour, for a man to be between fears and hopes, between doubting and believing. How true! Don't go through life unsure of your eternal life. Put forth mental, spiritual, and physical effort to understand salvation, and to ensure you have trusted fully and savingly in Jesus.
2. Make Christ and Scripture the only foundation for your souls and faith to build on. Amen. Everyone needs a bedrock or set of core life principles. By default, most of us sort of stumble into them by a combination of relationships, common sense, and TV commercials. Make Scripture the foundation for how you see yourself and the world.
3. In all places and company, be sure to carry your soul preservative with you: go into no place or company, except you carry your soul preservations with you, that is, a holy care and wisdom. Recently, NARCAN (R) nasal spray became an over-the-counter drug that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose. For many, carrying the little spray is a difference between life and death. Christians must treat godly wisdom as vital as carrying NARCAN in all of our choices.
4. Look that all within you rises higher and higher, by oppositions, threatenings and sufferings, that is, that your faith, your love, your courage, your zeal, your resolutions, and magnanimity rises higher by opposition and a spirit of prayer. Difficulty need not defeat the Christian. If it drives us closer to Jesus, He will strengthen us through the trials.
5. Take more pains, and make more conscience of keeping yourselves from sin than suffering; from pollutions and defilements of the day, than from the sufferings of the day. Sometimes at the dinner table we play the silly game "Would You Rather?" and they will be two good or bad choices: Would you rather lose an arm or lose a leg? Would you rather have a house full of marshmellows or potato chips? Here, Brooks asks the Christian to weigh, Would you rather suffer and avoid sin, or sin and avoid suffering? Answer, take the pain and avoid sin!
6. Be still doing or receiving good. This will make your lives comfortable, your deaths happy, and your account glorious, in the great day of our Lord. Serving patiently at church, helping a family member, living generously, caring for your children or your aging parents, walking patiently with someone away from addiction and into faith in Jesus. These things may not feel very important when you are doing them, but they are the kinds of things that will stand out when we stand before Jesus.
7. Set the highest examples and patterns before your face of grace and godliness for your imitation. In the business of faith, set an Abraham before your eyes; in the business of courage, set a Joshua; in the business of uprightness, set a Job; of meekness, a Moses. We need to learn from others who have pursued the same kind of legacy we want to leave, and the Bible shows us both the Perfect Savior, and imperfect men and women who were nonetheless used by God to leave legacies.
8. Hold fast your integrity, and rather let all go that let that go. A man had better let liberty, estate, relations, and life go, than let his integrity go. God, make this true of me! May I be a man, by Your Grace, who does what he says, even if it's not to my immediate advantage.
9. Let not a day pass over your head without calling the whole man to an exact account. Banking app's have made it easy to see where we stand financially. But, where do we stand spiritually? Have we made choices, spoken words, done things that please God? If not, then let us be quick to ask God's forgiveness and grace to repent. If so, then let us be quick to give God the praise for working through us.
10. Labour mightily for a healing spirit. How many families and neighborhoods and communities and cities and countries would be thoroughly blessed if more people worked hard at being the kind of people who lifted others up, who left people better off for their interactions, in short who loved their fellow men and women?
11. Be most in the spiritual exercises of religion. If you listed out every hour of a typical day, what gets your most time? What gets your best time, when you are most awake and focused? For many of us, it's our daily jobs. Yet, what if we structured our schedules in order to give our best times to reading the Bible, to praying, to going expectantly to church, to those public and private exercises of religion? These are the endeavors of those who have experienced forgiveness in Jesus by God's grace, and are thoroughly convinced that God's Word points us to God, Himself, in whom is the greatest joy.
12. Take no truths upon trust, but all upon trial. We try truths first in Scripture and only with Scripture by experience. For without scripture, our experience will be both limited and insufficient to judge whether a truth is eternally true or conveniently true.
13. The lesser and fewer opportunities and advantages you have in public to better and enrich your souls, the more abundantly address your souls to God in private. We all need a closet, a tree, a walking path, a chair, a special place to get alone with God. Jesus had the hills of Galilee and the grove of olive trees. Where's your place to get alone with God?
14. Walk in those ways that are directly cross and contrary to the vain, sinful, and superstitious ways that men of a formal, carnal, lukewarm spirit walk in. Pursuing Christ and the abundant life in Him means tenaciously turning away from many habits both accepted and lauded in common culture. Expect to be thought weird while heartily pursuing the ways of God.
15. Look upon all the things of this world as you will look upon them when you come to die. I wonder what I will want most in my final hours of life on this earth? I highly doubt emails, or blogposts, or text messages, or cars, or houses, or 401k's, or a million other things will be what I ask for. I imagine I will want my wife's hand, my Bible, and someone to pray and sing with me. Maybe I should reevaluate the value I attach to things now.
16. Never put off your conscience with any plea or with any argument that you dare not stand by in the great day of your account. Brooks takes us again to the great day when we stand before Jesus for final judgment. Would we dare try to excuse our sin before Jesus? Of course not! Then, let us not try to excuse our sin today, or logic our way into making our sin excusable. I'm stressed. I'm lonely. It's been a hard week. No one's perfect. We will never say those things to Holy King Jesus, so let's not say them now, even to ourselves, as excuses for our sins.
17. Eye more, mind more, and lay to heart more, the spiritual and eternal workings of God in your souls, than the external providences of God in the world. Many of us want to know if grand world events signal the impending return of Christ. Or at least to try to discern what God is up to. But, far more important is to seek out His will and working inside of me, than outside in the wide world.
18. Look as well on the bright side as on the dark side of the cloud; on the bright side of providence as well as on the dark side of providence. It's almost natural (since humanity's fall into sin) to assume the worst, even of God's ordering of things. That's just the way things are. God is punishing me. Maybe it's time for that church to close. These things may be true. But, to focus ONLY on these things is to focus only on the dark side of God's sovereign work. Guide your heart by intentionally seeing God's good works. Heaven will be different from the way things are. God is growing in me the character of Jesus. Maybe God is about to do something radical in our church, or use us to start a new one with new leadership.
19. Keep up precious thoughts of God under the sourest, sharpest, and severest dispensations of God to you. For many Christians, singing praise and worship music to God has been voicing their faith in the midst of very hard circumstances. Because you love God, when things get very painful, sing.
20. Hold on and hold out in the ways of welldoing, in the want of all outward encouragements, and in the face of all outward discouragements. Sometimes, when Christians are struggling with depression or just feeling blue, I encourage them to come and serve at our church's food pantry. Flipping pancakes, pouring coffee, loading up groceries, meeting new people, praying for those in need, talking about the great sacrifice of Jesus for us - depressed Christians NEED this kind of welldoing for their own sakes.
21. In all your natural, civil, and religious actions, let divine glory still rest on your souls. For whose glory am I working? Ask this question often.
22. Record all special favours, mercies, providences, and experiences. Keeping a journal may be cumbersome, but keeping a record of God's kindnesses shouldn't be tedious. One of the best things my dad left me when he passed away was his devotion book filled with his prayers and praises. I get to hear the ways God carried my father through his life. That's a legacy worth leaving and treasuring.
23. Never enter upon the trial of your estate, but when your hearts are at the best, and in the fittest temper. It's both easy and stupid to suddenly stumble into a trial. We prepare by private and public spiritual disciplines, by keeping away from sins, and by keeping close to Jesus. May God strengthen me with spiritual fitness for the trials that tomorrow may bring.
24. Always make the Scripture, and not yourselves, nor your carnal reason, nor your bare opinion, the judges of your spiritual state and condition. I'm a pretty good person. I have heard that line many times. The problem is when I am my own judge and my own reasoning is the criteria for assessing goodness, all men and women will frequently assess themselves pretty good. We need an unbiased perspective, able to discern our thoughts, and lay open our hearts - that's God's gift to us in Scripture. Let the Bible read you.
25. Make much conscience of making good the terms on which you closed with Christ. When you became a Christian, you committed to follow Jesus as your Lord in addition to believing in Him as your Savior. These aren't two separate commitments. He IS Lord and Savior. I trust Him as Lord and Savior. So, make good on your commitment and keep following Jesus.
26. Walk by no rule but such as you dare die by and stand by in the great day of Jesus Christ. For a third time, the preacher takes us to the final day when we stand individually before Jesus at his second coming. May the principles that govern our lives be the kind of gold that will stand out on that day. May we be rid now of the principles that would be seen as straw and hay on that day.
27. And lastly, sit down and rejoice with fear. For some of us, we need to hear "sit down." Rest in Jesus. Draw near to your Savior, and like Mary, sit at his feet. For some, we especially need to hear "rejoice." Find your happiness centrally in Jesus. Let Him and make Him the central joy of your life. Finally, some of us need the reminder "with fear." May our resting and our rejoicing still be with reverent fear of the Great King.
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