Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God
Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God – one of J I Packer’s most important books – is this month’s free Audiobook download from Christian Audio. It’s read by American Grover Gardner.
Piper: World Vision USA’s move trivialises Perdition and the Cross
John Piper looks to the godly example of Jim Packer when he responds to Christianity Today’s report that “World Vision’s American branch will no longer require its more than 1,100 employees to restrict their sexual activity to marriage between one man and one woman.”
Piper: “This is a tragic development for the cause of Christ, because it trivializes perdition — and therefore, the cross — and because it sets a trajectory for the demise of true compassion for the poor.
When J.I. Packer walked out of the 2002 synod of the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster, he was protesting its decision to ‘bless same-sex unions.’ His rationale is relevant for the developments at World Vision…”
– Read it all at Desiring God.
Related:
Pointing to Disaster — The Flawed Moral Vision of World Vision – Albert Mohler.
On World Vision and the Gospel – Russell Moore.
Franklin Graham Statement on World Vision – Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. “My dear friend, Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse, would be heartbroken. He was an evangelist who believed in the inspired Word of God.”
The Road Less Traveled: The Faithfulness of J.I. Packer vs. the Capitulation of World Vision – Justin Taylor.
The Hole In Their Bible – Todd Pruitt. “Stearns says that World Vision is united around the Apostle’s Creed. But what profit is there in affirming belief in God while denying that which He has made so clear?”
And from the files: Are we stronger than He? – by David Short, published in ACL News, January 2005 (PDF file).
Photo: Canon David Short and Canon Dr J I Packer at St. John’s Vancouver – they both left the Anglican Church of Canada because of that denomination’s departure from obedience to the Scriptures.
To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism
The Anglican Church in North America has released an updated Catechism for their Province. Dr J I Packer is the General Editor. (h/t Anglican Ink.)
Related:
Fighting heresy in churches and small groups. – Interview with Jim Packer.
The Good News We Almost Forgot. – Tim Challies reviews Kevin DeYoung’s book on the Heidelberg Catechism.
The New City Catechism – Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York via Andy Naselli.
Taking God Seriously
Here’s a challenging video clip from Dr J I Packer on Taking God Seriously.
It’s a subtle promotion for the book of the same name – the video was published almost a year after the book.
Runs for 1:52 at Vimeo. Well worth passing on the link.
About the book, Carl Trueman writes:
“Like many people, I first discovered what it meant ‘to take God seriously’ through reading J. I. Packer’s books. It is thus an honour and a delight to be asked to write a commendation for his latest work, a basic catechetical plea for sober, modest, thoughtful and orthodox theology.
In a church world dominated by Barnum and Bailey circus antics and the brash triviality borrowed from the world around in the name of ‘engagement,’ Dr. Packer remains a truly engaging and gentlemanly advocate for those old paths which are ever fresh.”
Related: Dr Packer’s most recent sermon preached at St. John’s Vancouver, 5th January 2014 – on John 4:1-45.
Why I ran to Confessionalism
“So, in August of 2013 I ran to confessionalism. Specifically my ordination was transferred to the Presbyterian Church in America and I became the Lead Pastor of a PCA congregation.
The experience has been like finding an oasis in a desert. It has been like discovering a GPS after meandering blindly through an unknown country. Too dramatic? It does not feel that way to me. It is nearly impossible to effectively put down error and nurture unity within a church whose minimal statement of faith is only able to identify the grossest of heresies.”
– Todd Pruitt, who blogs at 1517, and co-hosts The Mortification of Spin with Carl Trueman, shares his discovery.
Related: The Thirty Nine Articles.
J. I. Packer: Fighting Heresy in Churches and Small Groups.
Grounded in the Gospel – J I Packer on The White Horse Inn.
The definitive work on Definite Atonement
From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, edited by David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson, is a major publication. …
David Wells says, “This is the definitive study. It is careful, comprehensive, deep, pastoral, and thoroughly persuasive.”
Michael Horton calls it “the most impressive defense of definite atonement in over a century.”
Read about it from Justin Taylor, see John Piper commending it, check out the book’s website and read an excerpt (PDF).
J. I. Packer: “I count it an honor to be asked to supply a foreword to this massive product of exact and well-informed scholarship.”
Archbishop Wabukala defends GAFCON
On Tuesday night, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, Chairman of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans spoke at The Ridley Institute in South Carolina.
He spoke on “In Defense of GAFCON” with reference to The Thirty Nine Articles.
His address deserves wide distribution and is most encouraging. Archbishop Wabukala’s address begins 16 minutes into the video recording. (The address runs for about 45 minutes, followed by the question time which begins, after a break, at 1 hour 15 minutes into the recording. Also worth watching.)
Update: The text of his address is now available (PDF) on the GAFCON website as well as at The Ridley Institute.
Here’s a quote:
“I am so thankful to God that Christianity as moralism was not, on the whole, the gospel brought from England and the West to Africa and what we now call the Global South during the great missionary initiatives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the GAFCON movement coined the phrase ‘Confessing Anglicans,’ Provinces like mine which are the fruit of missionary endeavors have always been ‘confessing.’ For many of us the writings of John Stott and J.I. Packer simply were normal Anglicanism and too many of us assumed that the rest of the Communion thought the same way!
However, in the past thirty years it has become clear that the West has finally exhausted the capital of its Christian heritage. The combination of secularization and the growth of global media and communications has laid bare a fundamental theological divergence between Western secularized moralistic Anglicanism and confessional Anglicanism. The resulting strains have seriously damaged the Communion — many faithful orthodox Anglicans have been marginalized or even ejected from the formal structures of their Churches. Sexual immorality has not only been tolerated but held out to be holy and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other formal instruments of Communion are no longer able to fulfill their basic purpose of gathering the Communion. …”
New Westminister nominees list is out
The names of those nominated for the position of Bishop of New Westminster, in the Anglican Church of Canada, have now been released. Anglican Essentials Canada Blog have helpfully added links to the CVs and videos of the candidates. Lots of talk of diversity.
The Synod begins 30th November, to replace Michael Ingham, pictured, who retired in August. Bishop Ingham famously declared that J I Packer and David Short had abandoned Christian ministry.
How can Systematic Theology enrich and energise preaching?
Canon James Packer spoke recently for The Charles Simeon Trust in the US.
Classic Packer. Set aside an hour and be encouraged and strengthened in your preaching (or in encouraging others in their preaching).
On Vimeo. (h/t Justin Taylor.)
The Gentle Temeraire
“The book is a devotional gem.
It is also a reminder that perhaps the most important voices in the church are not those of the young and the beautiful, of the middle aged who cannot accept that their teenage years are behind them, least of all of the Twittocrats who can reduce any profound and subtly beautiful truth to 140 banal and clichéd characters; instead, they are the voices of the old and the weak who know whereof they speak when it comes to the cross and suffering and weakness.”
– Read all of Carl Trueman’s commendation of J I Packer’s Weakness is the Way.
The Marcions have landed!
“When one asks the most influential thinkers in the modern evangelical church are, one might find names such as Jim Packer, John Stott, and Don Carson.
I would like to suggest, however, that there is one whose influence is perhaps much greater than we are aware of, yet whose thinking all but pervades the modern evangelical church: Marcion. …”
– There’s plenty to think about in Carl Trueman’s article at Evangelicals Now.
Expository Preaching: Charles Simeon and Ourselves
“Expository preaching is the preaching of the man who knows Holy Scripture to be the living word of the living God, and who desires only that it should be free to speak its own message to sinful men and women; who therefore preaches from a text, and in preaching labours, as the Puritans would say, to ‘open’ it, or, in Simeon’s phrase, to ‘bring out of the text what is there’…”
– More than fifty years ago, J I Packer wrote this article on Simeon and preaching – for Churchman. You can now read it here online (PDF file).
Why Catechesis now?
“The church in Western culture today is experiencing a crisis of holiness. To be holy is to be ‘set apart,’ different, living life according to God’s Word and story, not according to the stories that the world tells us are the meaning of life.
The more the culture around us becomes post- and anti-Christian the more we discover church members in our midst, sitting under sound preaching, yet nonetheless holding half-pagan views of God, truth, and human nature, and in their daily lives using sex, money, and power in very worldly ways. …”
– Tim Keller lays out the need for a new Catechism to be launched next week by The Gospel Coalition.
Related: Grounded in the Gospel – J I Packer on The White Horse Inn.
Sydney Anglicans VII: The value of theological education
Mark Thompson writes part seven of his series on Sydney Anglicans –
“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that you will not understand the Diocese of Sydney unless you’ve understood its theological college…”
Read it all here –
Without a doubt the single most important resource God has given to the diocese of Sydney is Moore Theological College. Opening in 1856, thanks to a marvellously generous bequest by Thomas Moore, an early settler in Sydney, it has provided theological education for the vast bulk of Sydney’s clergy over the last one hundred and fifty-six years. Read more
Walking in opposite directions
From St. George’s Tron in Glasgow:
“Download Walking Away from Jesus by Willie Philip and Walking with Jesus by Dr J.I. Packer.
Over a year ago, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland took the decisive step of walking away from the historic, orthodox Gospel. These reflections on that decision were written by Dr Philip for the Tron Times of May 2011.
By re-publishing them now, alongside the article by Dr Packer, we see clearly that the situation faced by our church family in recent days is shared by many in the world-wide confessing church today. There is great encouragement to know we don’t stand alone.”
– Download here. (PDF)
What we believe
The message at the heart of Christianity is really quite simple…