Episode 141: On The Life and Ministry of J. I. Packer

Hello friends, this is Mark Devere here from Nine Marks. A little over 20 years ago now, Jim Packer was going to be here in town for a number of meetings, and I ask him if I could do an interview with him for Nine Marks. He said, "Sure." And he came over and this is the interview that we did. We're putting this out again now because the Lord has called Jim home recently, and we are thankful for him and are remembering him and his work. And re-releasing this interview is part of the way we want to give thanks to God for the good that he's done through him. Welcome to the Nine Marks Ministries Leadership Interview Series. This interview series, previously known as the Center for Church Reform or CCR series, is dedicated to equipping church leaders and congregations in the application of biblical principles in the local church, sponsored by Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. The Nine Marks Ministries Interview Series features in-depth discussions with pastors, theologians, and church leaders from around the world. After the interview, please listen for more information about Nine Marks Ministries and its mission for local church health. Our guest today is Dr. James I. Packer, born in Gloucestershire, England in 1926 and educated at Oxford University, earning degrees in classics and theology. Dr. Packer was ordained in 1952. He served in several churches and academic positions in England until 1979 when he became Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Regent College van Kuver, British Columbia. He also serves as a senior editor and visiting theologian of Christianity today, magazine. He now serves as the Board of Governors, Professor of Theology at Regent College, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of evangelical Christianity in the 20th century. He's the author of numerous books including Knowing God, Evangelism in the Sovereign Day of God, and Quest for Galliness, and many, many more. His books have sold over three million copies worldwide, and Christianity today readers named him one of the most influential theological writers of the 20th century, second only two. Do you know the answer, Dr. Packer? I believe CS Lewis. That's right. How do you feel about that? Well, if that's what they say, I don't feel able to stop them saying it. I must say I can't quite see myself in that role, but if that's what they say, let it stand. Well, we're glad to have you here in Washington joining us. And also as usual, we welcome Dr. Mark Devar, the senior pastor of Capital Hill Baptist Church, and also the senior fellow of the Center for Church Reform. Welcome Mark. I get the first question probably asked by millions every day. What does I in J.I. Packer stand for? The family name in all I double and E double L. The family no longer exists, but my father had a second cousin. I think it was who thought of herself as last of the line and leaned on him very hard to give the name to me. So now I have it. It hasn't brought me salvation. It hasn't brought me anything as a matter of fact except questions like your question. Did you pass it on to either of your children? No, I didn't. Well, there that was. Jim, thank you very much for being here with us today. And does it amuse you the way Americans sort of make over you like your celebrity? Yes. But that's all right. Let's have an ordinary conversation. That's how we human beings. This time we'll do that. Thank you for that. You were brought up in England, as Matt just said, and were you brought up in a Christian home? The answer is more no than yes. We were a church going home, but we never had family prayers. We never read the Bible at home. We never even said grace before meals. And we never talked about the things of God at all. And you became a Christian in university. Right? God had softened me up by getting my mind stirred up about Christian truth during the previous three years. Then in my first term at Oxford, I heard the gospel preached in a clear straightforward way, realized with something of a shock that I wasn't a Christian yet. I had thought I was because by then I was orthodox, you see, in my beliefs. But when I realized that I wasn't, well, the Lord had His hand on me. And all I could do was to become a Christian and respond to His drawing power. Did you ever have a lecture with C.S. Lewis? Did you ever sit and hear Him lecture? I heard Him speak once much later at a meeting for theological students, and He talked on the Elizabethan Theologian Richard Hooker. And I couldn't tell as people who listened to His English lectures in the university also couldn't tell that there was anything particularly Christian about Him. He never paraded His Christian faith in academic circles. He saved that for what He wrote. And Jim, you went on and were ordained in the Church of England. That's right. And you continue to serve as a minister in the Anglican Communion, but not in the Church of England. No, but that's simply because of geography, I am licensed to serve in the Anglican Church of Canada, licensed by the Bishop of New Westminster, the particular area where Vancouver, where I work, actually is located. And I am a member of the ministry team of one of the churches of Vancouver, a church which I have seen grow over 20 years from having something like 150 people going through the church each Lord's Day divided between three services into a church that serves about 1,100 people each Lord's Day. Still divided between three services, but it's been a spectacular advance and it's entirely due to the preaching of the Bible and the gospel. And you're married with two children? Married with three. Three children. Two girls, one boy. That's right. And you met your wife, not in Canada, but in England before you moved. Yes, that's right. And you met her, if I'm remembering right, at Westminster Chapel. No, you're not quite right. I met her at retreat at which I was speaking and the people attending were the combined Christian unions of St. Bartholomew's hospital. She was a nurse at St. Bartholomew's, which we call "Barts" for brevity. And it was rather a happy business because she shouldn't have been there. She should have been on the ward, but her ward sister had told her that she was not appear on the ward until a swollen eye that she had was cured. And I shouldn't have been there, but a friend of mine who had double booked himself passed on the preaching assignment to me. So there we were. We met and the rest is history. Now, did she, her name is Ket, right? That's what she likes to be called. That's all I have heard her call. That's right. Her baptismal name is something which I'm under promise not to reveal. She doesn't like it. Now, when you met her, where was she attending church? Westminster Chapel. That's why you were almost, right? Not quite. But you weren't attending Westminster Chapel because you were a minister of the Church of England. And Westminster Chapel is a non-conformist and non-anglicant church. No, wait a minute. I was not here to ordained. I was in my last year as a theological student at seminary, but your sense of the situation is quite right. Anglican clergy don't ordinarily frequent non-anglican places of worship. No, she was a Welsh Methodist by extraction and she'd become a congregationalist in London at Westminster Chapel where the minister Martin Lloyd Jones was a congregationist himself. When she married me, she became an Episcopalian. Now, at one point, if I'm remembering the story right, I've heard you tell this and I've heard Elizabeth Catherwood tell this. Lloyd Jones commented to you on the amount of women that were coming to the meetings. Get something like this? Yes. Can you tell us this story? Oh, yes, I'm glad to. Lloyd Jones was in fact one of the wittiest men I've ever met out of the pulpit. There was never any humor when he preached, except sometimes a grim grotesque touch which made people giggle. But he was witty, and the occasion you're referring to was tea time on the second day of the Puritan Studies Conference in 1952. He was the chairman. I was the secretary and we were planning the conference for the next year. And you're quite right. He took it on him to complain to me of the fact that there'd been a couple of women at the meetings of the conference. He was very much of the opinion that pastoral ministry was man's work and the business of women was to support the men rather than to take part in the work themselves. Frankly, I don't agree with him on that, but that's another matter. He complained that there'd been these two women present and having got engaged to kit the previous evening. Full of it. I said to him, "Well, Dr. Asamaterfet, I'm going to marry one of them." And without batting on eye, he came straight back saying, "Well, you see, I was right about one. Now what about the other?" Now, was he, you were married soon after that? 18 months after. And you continued to cooperate with him in that Puritan Studies Conference for another 16 years, 18 years? That's about right. The Puritan Studies Conference came to an end in 1970. The conference that I've spoken at before the Westminster Conference is something similar to that? Yes, it is, but after 1970, when the Puritan Conference dissolved, the Westminster Conference was born with slightly different terms of reference. At that time, Dr. Lloyd Jones was campaigning that the word isn't too strong for evangelicals in what he called "doctorinally mixed denominations" to leave their denominations and come together in a loose association, which would have been more like a congregational association than anything else. And the Westminster Conference was for clergy and Christian workers who were committed to that successionist principle. So you were in the Church of England at that point as you are now and you were serving at that time in the 1950s in what capacity? I was an assistant minister at a parish church in Birmingham, England, St. John's Church Harbourn, to be precise, and I served there for two years before being called into theological teaching. Which you've been doing ever since? One way and another, yes. Oxford Bristol and Vancouver for the last 20 years. That's right. Right. Plus all this writing. Did you intend to be an author? No. I didn't realize that that would be part of my vocation at all, until I was asked to write a pamphlet, which turned into a book, and which sold 20,000 copies in its first year. And that experience convinced me that God was calling me to make writing a major part of my pastoral ministry, which I've been seeking to do ever since. And that book was Fundamentalism in the Word of God. That's right. Published in 1958. And continuously in print since then? That is so. University Press in Britain and Erdman's over here? Yes. And Erdman's kept it in print as a matter of effect during a few years, during which university in Britain let it fall out of print. But it's sold. It's a sold every year. We certainly found that a very useful book in our own church. We've encouraged people to read that with younger Christians. If there are people who are listening to this type, who haven't read it, it's got to be one of the best, if not the best, brief defense of a biblical understanding or rather of a Christian understanding of authority for our faith. It would be good to read with John Williams Christ in the Bible. Christ particularly in his attitude, the Old Testament, didn't think more systematically, theologically, about how the way we as evangelicals are approaching the Bible is somewhat different than the way modernist or liberals on the one hand or Roman Catholics on the other hand are approaching it. You're right, of course, in picking up the plot line, or the controversial thrust, perhaps I better say, of the book. And if you think it's as good as that, well, who am I to contradict you? Jim, why is inerency such an important issue? Well, the idea of biblical authority is emptied of most of its meaning. If you don't link it with the thought that all the Bible tells you is actually truth from God. If you affirm the inerency of a Bible, which you yourself are free to reconstruct by saying, well, this bit is wrong, that bit is wrong, these bits are to be deleted. You really constructed your own canon of Scripture, you're ascribing divine authority to that, but that's a cheat. Really, what you're doing is claiming authority from God for your own ideas. And it's to make that point that I have campaigned over the years, as indeed I have, for the truth, I believe it to be a truth, that inerency is an integral part of the evangelical doctrine of biblical authority. And you were certainly very active in the late 70s and early 80s in the International Council on biblical Inerency. Do you feel that you all were successful and what you undertook to do in that? On the whole, yes. The council had a 10-year life, I was the one person who warranted its being called international, by the way. Everybody else on the council was from the USA, but I was from Britain at that time. Good, what did Nicole? I know it was on that, giving it a foreign flair. Giving it a foreign accent, but he was an American citizen. That's true. That would be a Roger Nicole. Roger Nicole, that's right, a dear personal friend. What we achieved in those 10 years was, first of all, the production of three representative unit of statements, all of which I think were widely accepted as what they were intended to be. No, just remind what that is. That's the Chicago statement of my ex-examination. The Chicago statement on biblical inerence. And then 82 on hermeneutics. On hermeneutics, that's right. And what was the other one? The third was on, I'm not sure, what phrase we used. The application of scripture was the theme, the Bible in life, would be the, what should I say, the snappy title for any account of statement number three. The purpose of the statement was to show that in relation to the problems of modern society, the Bible had something clear and explicit to say, which those who believe that the Bible is truth from God could agree on. They were meant to be unit of statements. Also, we produced, I think, about 10 books, defending the truth and trustworthiness of scripture from different angles and showing that this belief didn't produce incoherent theology just the reverse, it produced wisdom. Some of those books are in print still and coming as a series, which they did, they had an effect, I'm sorry, I have to say it this way, they had an effect of sidelining some evangelical institutions which had given up inerency, calling attention to the fact that they were out of step and demonstrating that the way of wisdom was for them to get back into step with the rest of us. With that, our work, how would one say it, raised the morale of those who had always in their hearts believe the biblical inerency was part of the truth, but they had been over-ord by the scholarship, which some of these institutions had paraded. This was a case of Evangelicals from inside the Evangelical Fellowship saying what liberals had been saying from the outside, namely that in light of modern knowledge, modern biblical criticism and so on, you just can't go on affirming that the Bible is entirely true. The inerency, public, councils, publications, I think established the point that yes, you can. And during the, well, it's ten years and more, eleven years, since the council closed down in the belief that its work was done, Evangelical scholarship has blossomed in a very remarkable way. There are something like half a dozen major commentary series on all the books of Scripture that have been produced or are still being produced and inerency is being taken as fundamental as a principle of method for all the biblical exegesis that's being done in those commentaries. So I think we can fairly say, under God, the point was established, praise his name. Were you surprised when you read Harold Lindzell's book, Battle for the Bible, Back in the Mid-70s? I wonder what you think might have surprised me. I knew that Harold Lindzell was the kind of person who wrote that kind of book. I mean, it's a very forthright, black and white, controversial treatment that was Lindzell's specialty. I knew already most of the facts about particular institutions that had slipped in relation to biblical inerency. He paraded those facts in a way that was distinctly unfriendly, but he wasn't telling me much that I didn't know. I didn't, frankly, infuse about the book because I thought that the forthright slashing way in which he went at the matters in dispute was more like what I would call old-fashioned fundamentalism, where you tended to impute the, really, the personal dignity of the folk who were wrong. It was ten, his book was tending more to do that and to rubbish institutions where mistakes had been made. Then I thought was really appropriate in the situation. I knew you see that the people who had moved from biblical inerency were scholars of integrity who thought that that was the right way to go. Even the best scholars can make mistakes. And I think those scholars did make mistakes, but the way to deal with the mistakes was as scholar to scholar. And Lindzell, I thought, let himself and let all of us down, really, by not quite doing that, playing rather to a fundamentalist gallery. At the same time that the work of the ICBI was going on or proceeding it, really, I guess, and then overlapping with the first part of it, Karl Hinry had had a large personal project going on on God-revelation and authority, where he looked at epistemological issues. Yes. Any comments on that? He never identified, he certainly isn't an errantist, but he never threw himself at that polemical point in the same way many other people did. And yet his whole six volumes God-revelation authority certainly assumes and works on an understanding of the Bible as an errant, certainly affirms that it is. Any comment on Dr. Hinry's work there? Well, the way you describe the way he positioned himself is correct, I think the reason for it was twofold. One was that he was meditating this massive six-volume treatment of God-revelation and authority, and he didn't want to show his hand too soon on some of the disputed matters. And the other reason was that he, like myself, was unhappy at the swashbuckling, black and white fundamentalist denunciatory way in which others were handling the issue. I heard him speak on occasion. How can I say it? Aploding in a cautious way what the Inerrancy Council was doing. But reminding us in an impatic way that there is more to the reality of biblical authority than simply affirming the Inerrancy of the Bible. Of course, we knew that, but that was what he wanted to say at that time, and I think he was right to want to say it, because the danger of controversy is always that the range of your concern gets narrowed to the particular point about which you're arguing. And that's rather like blinders on a horse, making it almost impossible for them to see anything except just a narrow bit of reality straight under the nose. Let's say that now some of the people listening to this tape are serving churches. They thoroughly believe in the Inerrancy of the Bible. What do you think there's some of the major theological challenges that the average thoughtful pastor who's reading today? What are some of the major theological challenges that you think are on the horizon for evangelical Christians today in North America particularly? I believe that the biggest challenges have to do not with particular errors, but with scale or dimensions. I think that what we are failing to spell out is the greatness of God, the dignity of the human individual, the greatness of grace, and the reality of holiness. And I think that when those four realities are not being highlighted, people are, as it were, looking at Christianity through the wrong end of a telescope. I don't know whether you've ever looked at anything through the wrong end of a telescope. It's clear enough, but it's very, very far away. And I read my Bible, and then I listen, and read to see what is being said amongst evangelicals today on these four matters, and I'm conscious of a big difference. There are of course questions of precision. How precisely do you formulate the doctrine of God? How precisely do you formulate the doctrine of grace? How precisely do you formulate the reality of holiness? And how precisely do you give your account of the human individual? But primarily, my concern is about the scale on which these things are being dealt with. And I am afraid we are scaling God and man and grace down so that they appear much less significant realities than they really are. One of the recent things that I've certainly been reading about is the idea that God doesn't know the future, because the future isn't there to be known. Do you want to comment on that idea? Have you certainly heard of that going on? Oh, yes, I have. And with great respect, I think that this is one direct example of scaling God down. If the future isn't there to be known, well, what are we going to make of the predictive prophecies of Scripture? Prophecies which speak of the final certainty of Christ's return to judgment and the new heavens and the new earth. If it's in God's mind to bring those realities about, then the future does exist in the only significant sense, that is, it exists as part of God's plan. Could parts of the things of the future be in God's mind, with that other parts of the future being God's mind? If you're asking me to speculate, because I think that is the argument that's being made. It is, is it? Well, I've heard versions of that argument, a number of versions of that argument, and it plugs into a very common illustration, which I think a wise man would not use, namely the illustration of God as the master chess player who can be guaranteed to win the game, even though he doesn't know, after the first move, what his opponent is going to do. He's just confident, and we can be confident, that he will outplay the opponent whatever the opponent does. So the confidence is in his ability. That's right. It's not in the fact of God's relation to time. That's right. And I am old-fashioned enough to believe that time, which is God's creation, is one of the dimensions of the created order, which God transcends. As indeed, he does all the dimensions of the created order. He knows the end from the beginning, and there is nothing in the Bible to tell me that there are any details that he doesn't know. Indeed, there are things in the Bible, which point very strongly in the other direction. Jesus said, not a sparrow falls to the ground, without your father. God knows the very hairs of your head are all numbered. God has counted them. We are up against infinite, let's call it brain power, harnessed in infinite wisdom, by a God of infinite moral goodness, as well as infinite holiness, justice, truthfulness, and all the other qualities that make up the divine character. I'm sure that the people who put forward these ideas that scale down aspects of God's being don't intend to be a reverent, but I think that when you shrink God, you are always being irrelevant whatever you intended. A reverent? A reverent, yes, I'm sorry, my tongue slipped. Do you think John Piper's work has helped to scale God up? In contrast? Yes, I do. John Piper, I think, has been one of God's best gifts to American evangelicalism, these last 20 years. John has celebrated God. He has developed the thought that God himself celebrates God. God is his own end. Now, you've got to say that, I think, if you're going to be and be blickily consistent, because you then will go on to say, now, in as much as God's, God is His own end, God's glory is what God aims at. You can see what we should be aiming at, namely the same thing. And for us to aim at the glory of God is the noblest thing we can do, just because for God to aim at His own glory is the noblest thing He can do. John Piper has written endless variations on that theme. He got it, of course, from Jonathan Edwards. I think that it's thoroughly biblical and absolutely right, and I hope that John's work is increasingly widely read. Jim, one of the things that you wrote that I know has affected so many people has been your introduction to John Owen's book, The Death of Death and The Death of Christ. And if I can just read a few sentences from it and get you to comment on it now, you note the change that's happened in the presentation of the gospel. You were writing this in the late 50s, I think. Right. And you say, from this change of interest, a sprung a change of content for the new gospel has, in effect, reformulated the biblical message and the supposed interests of helpfulness. Accordingly, the themes of man's natural inability to believe of God's free election being the ultimate cause of salvation and of Christ dying specifically for a sheep are not preached. These doctrines, it would be said, are not helpful. They would drive sinners to despair by suggesting to them that it is not in their own power to be saved through Christ. The possibility that such despair might be salutary is not considered. It's taken for granted that it cannot be because it is so shattering to our self-esteem. However, this may be, and we shall say more about it later, the result of these omissions is that part of the biblical gospel is now preached as if it were the whole of that gospel, and to have truth, masquerading as the whole truth, becomes a complete untrue. Thus we appeal to all men as if they all had the ability to receive Christ at any time. We speak of its redeeming work as if he had done no more by dying than make it possible for us to save ourselves by believing. We speak of God's love as if it were no more than a general willingness to receive any who will turn in trust, and we depict the Father in the Son not as sovereignly active in drawing sinners to themselves, but as waiting in quiet impotence at the door of our hearts for us to let them in. It is undeniable that this is how we preach, perhaps this is what we really believe, but it needs to be said with emphasis that this set of twisted half-truths is something other than the biblical gospel. The Bible is against us when we preach in this way, and the fact that such preaching has become almost standard practice among us only shows how urgent it is that we should review this matter. I trust you remember writing those lines? Yes, I do, and if you're wondering, I agree still 100% with everything that I wrote then. I don't think anything has changed here over the last 40 years. I think that it's still too frequent altogether that people diminish God by suggesting that he's not sovereign in the conversion of us sinners, and I think it's all too frequent that we exalt the human individual and think of him or her as having much more power, including power to respond to God's gospel, then in fact any of us have. I think that the biblical gospel sends us down lower in our own estimate, humbles us more in other words, and raises God higher in our estimate, exalts him more, then is usually appreciated by preachers or by writers, and so the the truth, the true impression is not given. Jim, if people hearing are hearing some other gospel than this, are they being converted truly to God by some other gospel than this? Only God knows. God blesses His truth to the conversion of souls. There's no conversion, that is to say there's no regeneration and new birth, no change of heart issuing in faith's response to the message apart from the truth, which God blesses to that end. And when the truth is mixed up with error, or distorted by error, it's beyond us humans, I think, to say with confidence what is or isn't happening in the lives of individuals under the ministry of that muddled message. So I'm not surprised and I'm not bothered when I hear, as I do from time to time, and so I'm sure to you, that this or that preacher who preaches the modern gospel rather than the authentic biblical one, has been widely used to the conversion of souls. It may well be true, but it doesn't alter the fact that what God blessed to the conversion of those people was the truth, not the error, not the mixture as a mixture, but the truth that was there which God caused to lodge in the mind and the memory and become the matter of thought and realization, which brought people to the reality of conversion, where I think in every, you can say confidently in every single case, the person will be at the end of their personal tether. They will in the relevant sense be at the end of themselves. They will know that there's no hope for them, save, as they respond to the God, the Christ, who's coming to them, calling them, telling them that they're lost and hopeless and helpless, and they believe that, and then saying on that basis, as Christ does say to our hearts, receive Me, and the forgiveness and the new life that I bring. That's the Holy Spirit at work, and the best way to preach the gospel is the way that leads most directly to people coming to the end of themselves and their own natural hopes in that way, and focusing most directly on the Christ who comes, and in His sovereign Lordships, says, "Let me bring you the new life." Let me ask the other half of the question. Let's say the gospel is being fairly faithfully preached. Do you think it's common in evangelical churches to have false conversions? That is, people who appear to be converted, but genuinely aren't. I think that that is a commoner fact than one would like to admit, because to the extent that the gospel is falsified or distorted in the preaching, to that extent you are creating possibilities of misunderstanding, and experience, I think, shows that God doesn't always overrule that and cut the errors out of what people hear. I mean by that, that what lodges in people's minds is precisely the error. And then they act on the error, and it goes something like this in many cases. The preacher says, mistakenly, "If you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, you'll be forgiven and justified and saved." The hearer says, "Well then, that's what I have to do." And then the preacher offers him the wording of a sinner's prayer and he prays it, and he goes out of church saying, "I'm a Christian now." And nothing has been said to him about repentance. Nothing has been said to him about saying goodbye to the old life of self-centered, self-indulgence. Nothing has been said to him about the fact that henceforth he has a new life given him by the Lord, and he belongs to the Lord who's given him the new life. He's bought for the price. He's not his own. And therefore his whole business in life, I say, he, it will be she as well, their whole business in life is to glorify God in the way that they live day by day, where those things aren't said. You have an inadequate presentation of the gospel, and you're simply asking for false conversions, that is, people believing they've become Christians, when in fact they haven't. No one becomes a Christian who hasn't repented. No one becomes a Christian who isn't consciously saying goodbye to the old life and welcoming the new one. So what should a pastor do if he is concerned about false conversions growing up like mushrooms in his congregation? I want you to pastor do. Take great care to preach the whole of the real gospel, which involves a lot of preaching calculated to, I was going to say, to drive people to despair, that's not the way quite to put it, but at least to humble them with the awareness that they cannot save themselves, and that nobody is saved who is not actually brought into a new life through a change of heart. And then with that, the reality of regeneration itself, that is, the new heart and the new life, must be preached about and taught in such a way that nobody can miss the radical quality of the change. And much must be taught about the way in which Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit comes to people, presents himself to people, and draws out of them by His grace the response of faith and repentance, both. In the technicalities of theology, it's faith that, how can I say, channels the power to repent? That is, it's those who have received Christ, who then find that they are able to turn from the old life to the new life, just as now they know that they're bound, they're obliged, they're required to turn from the old life to the new life. It was only because Abraham had perceived God's promise that his foot could go toward the promised land, that faith, that perception of the promise had to be there before the action. I believe that is so, and where it was the perception of the promise, in the case of Abram, it's the person of the Lord Jesus Christ in New Testament ministry, because we need, we can never say too often and too clearly, Christ from His throne, makes Himself present to people when His Word is preached through the agency of the Holy Spirit. We don't, because I suppose many of us are afraid of the charismatic movement and all the excesses that have gone with it. We tend, I fear, not to say as much as we need to say in ordinary Christian teaching about the ministry of the Holy Spirit. I believe that the ministry of the Holy Spirit making Christ present to His people on a regular basis, making Christ present specifically to those whom He's drawing to Christ, renewing the heart, which generates His action in generating the new life, and in dwelling, if we're Christian from then on to sustain the new life, I think that that is as miraculous as anything that God ever did. I think that when Paul said, "If anyone's in Christ, there's a new creation." He was simply telling it like it is. And creation is creation. It isn't a manipulating or rearranging of what was already there. It's the imparting of something new, which previously wasn't there, and what's new in the case of the regenerate is the impulse or instinct to drive or thrust of the soul in the soul to honor and love and serve and adore and glorify and exalt the Father and the Son. Anyone who's truly converted has that drive at the very heart of their personal being. It's the thing they want to do most of all. It's the thing about which they're most distressed if they realize they haven't done it. This is the dynamic of the new life, and it comes out of regeneration, new birth, new life, imparted by the Holy Spirit. And one of the things I would say to today's reformed pastors is, "Do you make enough of the Holy Spirit?" A lot of reformed pastors in history simply haven't done so, which is why methodism in the 18th century, according to Methodism, according to Wesley, and then Pentecostalism in the 20th century and the charismatic movement that grew out of it, why they have appealed so much to people who started in a different frame of teaching and have moved over. These people know that they haven't been taught enough about the Holy Spirit, and they want to know more about the Spirit, and they want to experience more of the life of the Spirit. Well, speaking as one who's committed to the reformed theology of people like Calvin and Spurgeon and George Whitfield, I say, "We should never have neglected the New Testament teaching about the Holy Spirit. We should never have concentrated on the Father and the Son so much as to play down the ministry of the Holy Spirit. For in the New Testament, what is said about the Holy Spirit is simply breathtaking. The Holy Spirit is the agent of new creation and new life at every turn, and we mustn't sell him short in our ministry on other matters." We share your concern about conversion. Your answer to that is the preaching of the full gospel, the full council of God, but our church is the pastors today are under a different pressure. There's more of an entertainment mentality that they're to fulfill and less centrality of preaching in our worship services. Do you have a comment on that? Only to say that you're absolutely right. And therefore, the wise pastor has to level with his congregation as it seems to me, and tell them straight that he's not in the entertainment business, and that his shaping of the preaching and teaching ministry of the church isn't going to be built around entertainment. I don't think that in saying that the pastor is committing himself to a ministry that will be boring, only to a ministry that will be serious. Is he committing himself to a ministry that will be smaller? Perhaps. And if so, he must accept that, and that can be awkward, because of course, if people leave the church, it affects the income and the economic viability of the congregation. And I don't want to be scathing about pastors who have a problem there. But at the same time, it seems to me that what I've just said indicates the direction in which every pastor is going to have a clear conscience about his ministry needs to go. One of the ways in which the entertainment culture expresses itself today, as it seems to me, is in the kind of automatic call it. I don't want to call it entertainment, though that's what it is. All right, I'll call it entertainment. The kind of entertainment that's presented so often in the churches that call themselves "seeker friendly," and which, say, if asked to explain themselves, well, we are orienting everything we do to attract the un-attract the uncommitted outsider. I think there are two things wrong there, not just one. One is that we shouldn't cheapen the, or limit, the worshipping and teaching life of the congregation in order to concentrate on people who are not yet members of the congregation. Otherwise, the congregation will starve, and I can tell you frankly, that I have met members of congregations that have gone overboard in being "seeker friendly," and the saints are starving. But there's a second thing wrong, and that is that God himself is being dishonored by establishing a wavelength of entertainment, which means, how can I say it, gratifying people's present interests, which means worldliness, which means unspirituality, which means that if the outsider is allured by the skits and the songs and the drama and all of that, he or she will, well, I have to learn at a late stage about the greatness and the majesty of God. Or he or she will be an immature, juvenile, a, how can I say, a stunted Christian, for the rest of their days. As a way of forming people in Christ, the seeker-friendly, seeker-sensitive way of structuring church life seems to me to be absolutely wrong at that level too. Tim, do you have any other comments just from looking around at evangelical churches, concerns that you have about the common understanding of conversion or evangelism? There is just one thing that I'd like to add, and this sounds paradoxical when I say it, but I'm going to say it all the same, and then our wise listeners can process what I've just said. I know I think a number, quite a large number, of evangelical churches, where believe it or not, they don't evangelize in their evangelism. What they do, what the preachers do, is to talk constantly about Jesus Christ, about the new birth, about the Holy Spirit, but they don't get round to making the direct application to people, people in the congregation, I mean, in such a way that those people would have to search their own hearts, to know whether they were in the life or not yet in the life, about which the preacher has been talking. It's as if in our evangelical churches, where we're supposed to be so loyal and faithful to the scriptures, we are afraid of direct application. Neither Jesus, nor any of the apostles whose writings are recorded and the new, are given us in the New Testament, were afraid of searching direct application, but many of us as preachers seem to feel that at this point we've got to put kid gloves on and go gentle. That's very different from the evangelical ministry of the first 300 years after the reformation. I think William Perkins art of prophesying in the way he talks about all the different kinds of heroes you should imagine you have. That's right. William Perkins insisted that it was the preacher's job to make application of gospel truth, the word being preached, to all the different sorts of people that you could guarantee that every congregation will contain the people who are complacent and unconverted, the people who are just being awakened. First lot need a bomb under their seat and the preacher's business is to put it there. The second group need encouragement to go on seeking. There'll be people who are close to conversion, close to Christian repentance and faith and they must be guided directly into the reality of repentance and faith. There are the young Christians who must be built up. There are the old Christians who will have been in the life for years and now are tempted as we all are, as we get older to slack off in our discipleship. They have got to be given new motivation and encouragement. One thing that Perkins didn't say, but that I always say when I'm talking this way to pastors, as quite frequently I do, remember I tell them, you can guarantee that in every congregation there'll be at least one broken heart as well. So make sure that in your application something of the tenderness of Christ to distressed and troubled souls comes through. Oh yes, of course, in Perkins list it's just come to me. There's also the category of those who slipped morally and who need to be restored and something by way of application to that need ought to be said. And if you approach Bible truth the way that the Puritans did, well there are direct applications from just about every Bible truth for all those different sorts of people. But we're not very good at that these days and that's the point I want to make and beg my colleagues in the preaching ministry to reflect and adjust and do better at this point. Jim, the books that you've written that have certainly I've seen be used so much are Fundamentalism in the Word of God, Evangelism and the sovereignty of God, knowing God, many many others. I brought two cases full of your books over today for our conversation earlier. The other one that I would add to that that's been particularly useful is the collection among God's giants in Britain, quest for godliness over here. We're so many those papers you gave at the Puritan Studies Conference at Westminster Chapel in London are pulled together plus some other articles that you'd written on aspects of the Puritans and their vision of the Christian life. Any particular lessons that you would leave us with is our final question, our final thing to consider before we end this interview. Any lessons that you would particularly implore your evangelical brethren today to consider learning from the Puritans that have gone before them. That's a question I'm very happy to answer. You must get asked that question a lot. I wish I got it got asked it much more. Did some people think you're sort of the last Puritan? Like maybe you actually knew that you'd backstair or something? Maybe they do. There was an article featuring me in Christianity today a few years ago which described me as the last Puritan. Well Martin Lloyd Jones was described as the last Puritan in his day and as Persian in his and so on. So perhaps I'm in good company. But let me answer the question directly. From the Puritans we may and I believe need to learn first of all that God is very great, very wise and again and again very enigmatic. With our modern habit of shrinking God down almost to human proportions we expect to be able to see the reason for everything that God does in the short term. I mean to see the reason in the short term for everything that God does and then we feel that there's something wrong if we can't. Why is this happened to me? Why has this happened to our church? Why did our house burn down? Why has someone close to me got MS or cancer? Something like that. Two things we can learn from the Puritans in response to that question. One is that God knows what he's doing even though he doesn't always tell us book of Job teaches that. And second that God's reason for the things that He puts us through is often to be found in the future which He knows has planned and is bringing into being. I go back there you see to contradict once more one of them current modern ideas. The reasons in the future not in the past and I get that from Jesus' words to the disciples about the man born blind. The disciple said who's fault is it that he was born blind and Jesus said it isn't anybody's fault. He was born blind so that the works of God might be seen in him now. And when things that are inexplicably bad and depressing and so on happened to people today, well it is so often that the works of God may be seen in them starting now and going on tomorrow. So that at the end of the day we shall know the reasons in a way that at the moment of the events taking place we don't encounter because we don't know the future as God does. So that is one lesson which the Puritans understood very well which I would hope that people will learn from the Puritans today. Link to it that is the further lesson taught on page after page of the New Testament but neglected I'm afraid at this present time. It's the lesson that Christians need not expect to have it easy because they won't. Jesus suffered. The apostles suffered. There was persecution and there were other troubles as well. There was personal hostility even in the churches. Paul had a very difficult time with the Corinthians who refused to take him seriously as an apostle, refused to give them the welcome of their hearts to his ministry and you can see something of the pain that that caused him especially from the second letter he wrote them where he says I'm opening my heart to you wider and wider and you're not yet beginning to open your hearts to me. Well this is a kind of thing that happens. Personal relations go wrong that's what I'm saying and we must expect that and budget for it and modern Christians very often don't and if something begins to go wrong or the way is hard if they find themselves having to climb the hill difficulty as Bunyan puts it in his pilgrims progress well they immediately jump to the conclusion something's gone wrong either God has been unseated from his throne or he's forgotten all about me or something equally disastrous has happened and folk don't recognize that suffering and pain and the sort of pressure that I was referring to that's par for the Christian course. The Puritans had a self image of which they taught directly and indirectly all the time a self image whereby every Christian learns to see him or herself as the Lord's pilgrim traveling through an alien and hostile world to glory and as the Lord's soldier battling against the world the flesh and the devil you're in a war and you mustn't expect to make any headway along the path that leads to glory without opposition. If Christians today could see themselves as pilgrims and warriors and recognize that being born again to eternal life has brought them into that identity I think many Christians would get on a great deal better than in fact they do. That's into conflict rather than taking us out of it. Yes that's right and well what I'm really pleading for is the Puritan type of realism. And I think I could add to what I've said that the Puritans understood very well that no fidelity to God whatever its shape or form is finally wasted. In the short term it may be overwhelmed in the period of persecution in England that's of course the persecution under Charles II from 1664 through to 1688 and there was a parallel persecution in Scotland where the covenants were hounded down, scandalously by British soldiers. Well in periods a persecution of faithful stands seems hopeless. People take the stand and then they are imprisoned or actually snuffed out as was often done with the covenanters. In the long term nothing is wasted that is the word of hope and encouragement with which what is supposed to be a gloomy book I don't find it gloomy but what's supposed to be the gloomy book Ecclesiastes ends. A fear God and keep his commandments this is the whole business of life that's what the text means. For God will bring every work into judgment everything that man has done whether it be good or evil. That is not a way of saying that God can be God can be relied on to condemn everybody and everything that is a way of saying where there's been faithfulness and where the cussiness of things as it appears to human observers has squelched in the short term that good witness that act of faithfulness that attempt to serve and there's a lot Ecclesiastes describing the way that such events take place. Well we'd be wrong to suppose that that means it's lost for good. God at the final day of reckoning will celebrate what has been done faithfully and the value of it will appear even if in this world it gets squelched as I said and nobody seems to notice the value of it at all. Well the Puritans were clear on that and I wish that more evangelicals today were clear on it and were not mesmerized as so often they are by the success syndrome. The feeling that if you're not succeeding in the short term you just aren't doing things right whether you're a pastor whether you're a layman whether you're a businessman or whatever and the truth is that those who do things right in all these different capacities often in the short term don't make any headway at all. Well I'm speaking with some emphasis because I feel this so strongly. While God is on the throne and while he knows the future and while he is working out his Lordship in the affairs of men there is hope and that is what I would like to leave with anyone who hears this to you know world of skeptics you are pleading for realism and you sound hopeful and I think that's a good message for the next generation thank you very much for joining us. God established the church as a display of his glory amidst a world of human sin and suffering. Sadly we too often see that display obscured when the church follows the dictates of cultural trends and faithless methodological pragmatism yet we believe that the church can again convey God's splendor in local church life. To that end nine marks ministry's primary mission is to equip and encourage local churches in the application of biblical principles. You can learn more about our mission and what the nine marks are by visiting our website at www.9marks.org. On this website you'll gain access to literature, online instruction and audio resources. Again the web address is www.the number nine m-a-r-k-s.org. You may also contact us toll free at 888-543-1030 or write us at nine marks ministries 525-a-street northeast Washington DC-200002. Thank you for listening and for your prayerful support.