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The Empowered Christian Life, by J. I. Packer

| March 10, 2008 | no comments

Gifts are secondary. Sanctity is primary. Never let anything divert your mind and heart from holding fast to that truth.

Meeting Needs

3. It is right to want to be a channel of divine power into other people’s lives at their points of need.

 

Just be careful, however, lest you become one of those people who suffers from the neurosis of needing to be needed—the state of not feeling you are worthwhile unless you are able to feel that others need you. That is not spiritual health. That is lack of spiritual health.

One of the disciplines to which the Lord calls us is the willingness, for certain periods of our life, not to be used in significant ministry. Here is a gifted sister, and for quite a long period it may seem the Lord sidelines her so that her ministry is not being used. What is going on? Is this spiritual failure? It likely is not spiritual failure at all, but the Lord teaching her again that her life does not depend on finding people that need her. The source of her joy in life must always be the knowledge of God’s love for her—the knowledge that though he didn’t need her, he has chosen to love her freely and gloriously so she may have the eternal joy of fellowship with him.

In the spiritual life, what we are is always before what we do. If we lose touch with what we are, and with the reality of God’s free mercy as the taproot of our spiritual life, the Lord may have to sideline us until we have learned this lesson again.

Empowered Evangelism

4. It is right to want to see God’s power manifested in a way that has a significant evangelistic effect.

 

The line of thought to which I am referring here is the one that says evangelism is not evangelism until it has a particular kind of miracle attached to it. Frankly, I think that is an overstatement, a real error. The danger to which it gives rise is that those who practice evangelism will devise ways and means of manipulating people and situations to make it look as if wonderful things are happening through the power of God. Dishonesty and deception at this point must prove disastrous.

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Category: Living the Faith, Pneuma Review, Winter 2008

About the Author: James I. Packer died on July 17, 2020 at the age of 93. He was a British-born Canadian Christian theologian and was once named to Time magazine’s list of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America. He received a Ph.D. (Philosophy) from the University of Oxford, Oxford, England. As an Anglican theologian, Dr. Packer played a major role in British and North American evangelicalism. He wrote numerous books and scholarly articles, including the best-selling book, Knowing God (first published in 1973). www.regent-college.edu/faculty/retired/ji-packer

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