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preached on September 03, 2006 posted originally here.

How far have we fallen?

J.I Packer … said this, “It does not seem possible to deny that the Puritans were the strongest just where evangelical Christians today are the weakest. Here were men of outstanding intellectual power in whom the mental habits fostered by sober scholarship were linked with a flaming zeal for God and a minute acquaintance with the human heart. All their work reveals this unique fusion of gifts and graces.

Where the Puritans called for order, discipline, depth and thoroughness, our temper is one of casual, haphazardness and restless impatience. We crave for stunts, novelties and entertainments. We lost our taste for solid study, humble self-examination, disciplines, meditation and unspectacular hard work in our study. Again where Puritanism had God and His glory as its unifying center, our thinking revolves around ourselves as if we were the hub of the universe.”

And so he writes, “In evangelizing we preach the gospel without the Law and faith without repentance, stressing the gift of salvation and glossing over the cost of discipleship. No wonder so many professed conversions fall away.

And then…he writes…in teaching on the Christian life, our habit is to depict it as a path of thrilling feelings rather than of working faith and of supernatural interruptions, rather than of rational righteousness. And in dealing with the Christian experience, we dwell constantly on joy, peace, happiness, satisfaction and rest with no balancing reference to the divine discontent of Romans 7. The fight of faith in Psalm 73, or any of the burdens of responsibility and providential chastenings that fall to the lot of the child of God. The spontaneous jollity of the carefree extrovert comes to be equated with healthy Christian living and jolly extroverts in our churches are encouraged to become complacent in carnality while saintly souls of less sanguine temperament are driven almost crazy because they cannot bubble over in the prescribed manner,”

Now whenever I have the opportunity to preach on the doctrine of the Word of God, there is a great danger that this could go on for a long time and that you may feel like you’re drinking out of a fire hose at full volume because this is my passion, as you know, the Word of God. I love the truth, I live for the truth, I proclaim the truth, nothing is as important as the truth of God revealed in Scripture. And so, as we began last Sunday night talking about this issue of Scripture, we shall continue for many Sunday nights to come, not sure exactly how many to talk about the great doctrine of Scripture.
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