He may be in the crosshairs of Bishop Michael Ingham, but J.I. Packer isn’t letting that get him down. He recalls the many surprises that our gracious and loving God has brought his way, including his conversion to Christ, his call to ordained ministry, meeting his wife, becoming a published author, and leaving his native England to teach at Regent College, Vancouver.

These were the turning points in my life that I reeled off to illustrate the truth that believers serve a God of happy surprises, which is what I sought to tell the meeting. Straight after I had finished, the program required us all to sing “All the Way My Savior Leads Me.” Victorian hymns rarely do much for me (I am a Watts, Wesley, and Newton man), but, having through my own fault had to formulate on the fly and wing it verbally, and having, I thought, been helped in doing this, these words came as so true a theological interpretation of what I had just been through and the 63 years as a Christian that I had been talking about, that my heart was squeezed and I was almost in tears. In itself, the moment was yet another happy surprise, this time one of unexpected divine confirmation.

My blogging friend The Rev James Galyon yesterday posted some words of wisdom from Dr Packer on preaching the gospel.

According to Scripture, preaching the gospel is entirely a matter of proclaiming to men, as truth from God which all are bound to believe and act on, the following four facts:

(1.) that all men are sinners, and cannot do anything to save themselves;

(2.) that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, is a perfect Saviour for sinners, even the worst;

(3.) that the Father and the Son have promised that all who know themselves to be sinners and put faith in Christ as Saviour shall be received into favour, and none cast out (which promise is “a certain infallible truth, grounded upon the superabundant sufficiency of the oblation of Christ in itself, for whomsoever [few or more] it be intended”);

(4.) that God has made repentance and faith a duty, requiring of every man who hears the gospel “a serious full recumbency and rolling of the soul upon Christ in the promise of the gospel, as an all-sufficient Saviour, able to deliver and save to the utmost them that come to God by him; ready, able and willing, through the preciousness of his blood and sufficiency of his ransom, to save every soul that shall freely give up themselves unto him for that end.”

Amen to that! The Anglican Communion needs more preachers like J.I. Packer.

Source of quotation on gospel preaching: “’Saved by His Precious Blood’: An Introduction to John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ”, re-printed in A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life.