The Faith of the Pilgrims: A Burning, Biblical, Separated Testimony

 Brethren, when we speak of the Pilgrims, let us strip away the schoolhouse myths, the cartoons with buckles on hats, and the secularized fairy tale of “friendship with Indians.” Those things happened, but they are not WHY the Pilgrims matter to blood-bought, Bible-believing Christians in 2025.

The Pilgrims mattered because they were unashamed, uncompromising, separatist, Bible-saturated saints who counted everything rubbish for the excellency of knowing Christ Jesus their Lord. They were closer to us than most modern evangelicals will ever be.

Consider who they really were.

1. They were biblical separatists — not “tolerant reformers.”  

   They saw the Church of England as a false church, steeped in Roman Catholic remnants, ruled by a king who called himself head of the church instead of Christ. They believed the Scripture taught that a true church was a gathered company of visible saints, baptized upon profession of faith, walking in covenant together under Christ alone.  

   When King James said, “I will harry them out of the land,” they did not compromise. They left. First to Holland, then across a brutal ocean. That is fundamentalist separation in action. “Come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord” (2 Cor. 6:17). They obeyed it literally.

2. They were Calvinists to the bone — sovereign grace was their air.  

   Read William Bradford’s *Of Plymouth Plantation*—it drips with the language of divine providence and electing love. When the Mayflower finally dropped anchor, Bradford wrote that God had “delivered them from the designs of the wicked, and brought them by His special providence to this place.”  

   They believed God had chosen them before the foundation of the world, called them out of darkness, and planted them in a wilderness to build a visible kingdom of Christ. They were not Arminian decisionists begging sinners to “let Jesus in.” They were men and women who trembled at the doctrine of predestination and rejoiced that salvation is of the Lord from first to last.

3. They were covenant theologians who saw themselves as the Israel of God.  

   The Mayflower Compact was not a democratic experiment; it was a church covenant expanded to include families for civil order. Read the actual words:  

   “In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten… having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith… a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia…”

   They saw their voyage as an errand into the wilderness, a new Exodus. The Atlantic was their Red Sea. Cape Cod was their Sinai. They were pilgrims in the purest sense—strangers and pilgrims on the earth, looking for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God (Heb. 11:13-16).

4. They practiced thanksgiving as warfare against despair and unbelief.  

   Half of them died that first winter. Graves were leveled so Indians would not know how few remained. Yet when the harvest came in 1621, they did not throw a multicultural festival. They fell on their faces before Jehovah-Jireh in three days of prayer, fasting, psalm-singing, and preaching. The Wampanoag were invited only after the worship was planned. Thanksgiving was first and foremost the worship of the triune God who had preserved a remnant.

5. They raised children steeped in Scripture and catechism, not sentimentality.  

   Every child could recite the Shorter Catechism. They learned Hebrew and Greek. They were taught that the Bible was the only infallible rule of faith and practice. That is why, 400 years later, we still have the King James Bible in our pulpits—because men like John Robinson and William Brewster stood in the line of those who bled and died for an English Bible.

Beloved, the Pilgrims were not perfect. They had blind spots. But on the great doctrines that matter—on the authority and sufficiency of Scripture, the sovereignty of God in salvation, the lordship of Christ over church and conscience, ecclesiastical separation, and the crown rights of King Jesus—they stood like granite.

That is why we teach our children about them. Not so they can draw hand-traced turkeys. So they can see what it looks like when men and women love not their lives unto the death for the truth.

In 2025, when the world hates the doctrines of grace, mocks biblical separation, and turns Thanksgiving into a gluttonous, sports-watching, gender-confused spectacle, we look back to Plymouth and say:

“There. There were men and women who feared God more than the king, more than the ocean, more than starvation, more than death itself.  

There were Christians who believed the Bible cover to cover and ordered their lives by it.  

There were our people.”

And by God’s grace, we will be such a people again.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

DMMC 

11-15-25