A Total View of Christianity

Packer on the essence of Puritanism:

Puritanism . . . was a total view of Christianity, Bible-based, church-centered, God-honouring, literate, orthodox, pastoral, and Reformational, that saw personal, domestic, professional, political, churchly, and economic existence as aspects of a single whole, and that called on everybody to order every department and every relationship of their life according to the Word of God, so that all would be sanctified and become "holiness to the Lord."  

Puritanism's spearhead activity was pastoral evangelism and nurture through preaching, catechizing, and counselling (which Puritans themselves called casuistry), and Puritan teaching harped constantly on the themes of self-knowledge, self-humbling, and repentance; faith in, and love for, Jesus Christ the Saviour; the necessity of regeneration, and of sanctification (holy living, by God's power) as proof of it; the need for conscientious conformity to all God's law, and for a disciplined use of the means of grace; and the blessedness of the assurance and joy from the Holy Spirit that all faithful believers under ordinary circumstances may know. Puritans saw themselves as God's pilgrims, travelling home; God's warriors, battling against the world, the flesh, and the devil; and God's servants, under orders to do all the good they could as they went along.

—J. I. Packer, Honoring the People of God: Collected Shorter Writings on Christian Leaders and Theologians (Vancoover: Regent College Publishing, 1999), 24-25