The Bruised Reed: How Christ Deals Gently with Weak and Bruised Believers

You do not have to be strong for Christ to receive you. Richard Sibbes' most beloved book is for the weak, the doubting, and the bruised — and its one great message is that there is more mercy in Christ than sin in us.

First published in 1630, The Bruised Reed is among the best-loved of all Puritan books — one of the works God used to convert the young Richard Baxter, who never forgot it. Its author, Richard Sibbes (1577–1635), was known in his own day as the sweet dropper for the Christ-exalting warmth of his preaching, and no book of his shows that gift more perfectly.

Preaching on the Gospel's picture of the gentle Servant of the Lord — A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory (Matthew 12:20) — Sibbes unfolds how Christ deals with a soul brought low: sensible of sin, with only a faint spark of grace half-smothered by doubt. To such a one, he says, Christ comes not to break but to bind up, not to quench but to fan the spark into a flame — and he will not leave off until grace has triumphed over every corruption. This edition Complete and unabridged — the whole treatise, in its three parts, set from the 1630 first edition . With Sibbes' fore-going sermons — A Description of Christ , his three sermons on the preceding verses (Matthew 12:18–19, Behold my servant whom I have chosen… he shall not strive, nor cry), printed in 1639 as the lead-in to The Bruised Reed and not found in the standard modern edition . Here they open the book, exactly as Sibbes preached them. Faithfully modernized — the seventeenth-century spelling gently updated for easy reading, but Sibbes' own words, cadence, and voice preserved throughout. Not a paraphrase. The Fathers translated — Sibbes' marginal Scripture citations and his Latin quotations from Jerome, Bernard, and Augustine are given in footnotes, with the Latin rendered into English. A new introduction on Sibbes' life, the book's origin, and its long history of comforting troubled souls. Freshly typeset for comfortable reading — not a scanned facsimile. A small book with a long reach — tender medicine for weak faith, from one of the gentlest of the Puritan physicians of the soul.