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Timothy Edwards (1669-1758) was a Congregational (Puritan) minister in East Windsor, Connecticut. Edwards was the son of a wealthy merchant and graduated Harvard College in 1691. He was assigned to his East Windsor parish in 1694, where he remained for the rest of his life. He married Esther Stoddard, the daughter of a famous Northampton, Massachusetts, minister and they had eleven children. Timothy was famous for delivering his sermons from small notes, rather than from fully written-out scripts. This example is typical: it mainly cites Biblical verses which he would recite from memory and use as centerpieces of his sermon's points. This sermon was delivered on the Sunday after the Deerfield Raid. The Raid was traumatic for Puritan New England: for many this disaster meant that God's favor had deserted them, and they turned to their ministers for guidance. Edwards ran a school in his home, as was typical for the time. Here he educated the most famous of his eleven children, his only son, Jonathan (1703-1758), who would become one of the leading ministers of his day, a leader of the First Great Awakening.

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