Teaching People to Die Well

Justin Wainscott and Matt Crawford have recently posted helpful items on the importance of theology for helping us to live and die well. Justin reflected on the first two question s of the Heidelberg Catechism in light of preparation for a funeral and Matt quoted the trial of several early Christian martyrs in North Africa.

Both of these brought back to mind a comment from J. I. Packer in the recently released volume of essays on his life and work, J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future: The Impact of His Life and Thought. In Packer’s response essay he wrote:

“ ‘Our people die well,’ said John Wesley somewhere, commending Methodist Christianity. Dying well, as the final climactic step in living well, was a prominent theme in older Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox teaching on the Christian life and in some places may still be so. But in the West death has become the great unmentionable, like sex in Victorian times, and little is taught to Christians in these days about preparing for it. Instead, we live as if we shall be here forever, and very many churchpeople, one fears, have matched the self-protective young man in Charles Williams’s Many Dimensions who ‘passed . . . a not unsuccessful life in his profession, and the only intruder he found himself unable to cope with was death.’ This being so, and knowing as we do that life in this world is a terminal condition, it is surely most important that our catechesis should promote readiness for dying. When the late Dag Hammarskjold wrote that only one who knows how to die can know how to live, he was absolutely right, and our churches are much at fault in having forgotten it.” (177)

These are reminders of important truths. As pastors, our teaching and preaching is not merely abstract. We must keep in mind that we are preparing people to live well and ultimately to die well. We will all die. Let us prepare to do so well.

Packer, What is the Gospel?

As we approach the Lord's day may we be faithful in proclaiming this message.

“I formulate the Gospel this way: it is information issuing in invitation; it is proclamation issuing in persuasion. It is an admonitory message embracing five themes. First, God: the God whom Paul proclaimed to the Athenians in Acts 17, the God of Christian theism.

Second, humankind: made in God’s image but now totally unable to respond to God or do anything right by reason of sin in their moral and spiritual system. Third, the person and work of Christ: God incarnate, who by dying wrought atonement and who now lives to impart the blessing that flows form his work of atonement.

Fourth, repentance, that is, turning from sin to God, from self-will to Jesus Christ. And fifthly, new community: a new family, a new pattern of human togetherness which results from the unity of the Lord’s people in the Lord, henceforth to function under the one Father as a family and a fellowship.” (44, emphasis added)

Packer, J.I. Serving the People of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J.I. Packer. Vol. 2. Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1998.

Packer on Communion

J. I. Packer has a wonderful essay on the Lord’s Supper titled “The Gospel and the Lord’s Supper” in Serving the People of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J.I. Packer, Vol 2 (I have the Paternoster edition, but it is published this side of the pond by Regent).

In the original article he is addressing some specific issues in Anglicanism, but it is quite applicable to all evangelicals. He expounds the gospel in contrast to some competing gospels (Barth, Hick, popular self-help) and discusses how the Supper is to be a reminder of the true gospel. It is a great, short read.

Here are some quotes to entice you.

“The Lord’s Supper is about the Gospel of the marvelous sovereign grace of God, saving sinners who are fundamentally and radically bad until grace finds them and makes them new.” (46)

“What we need more than anything else at the Lord’s Table is a fresh grasp of the glorious truth that we sinners are offered mercy through faith in the Christ who forgives and restores, out of which faith comes all the praise that we offer and all the service that we render. . . . for this everlasting gospel of salvation for sinners is what in Scripture the Lord’s Supper is all about.” (49)

“We are also to learn the divinely intended discipline of drawing assurance from the sacrament. We should be saying in our hearts, ‘As sure as I see and touch and taste this bread and this wine, so sure is it that Jesus Christ is not a fancy but a fact, that he is for real, and that he offers me himself to be my Saviour, my Bread of Life, and my Guide to glory. He has left me this rite, this gesture, this token, this ritual action as a guarantee of this grace; He instituted it, and it is a sign of life-giving union with him, and I’m taking part in it, and thus I know that I am his and he is mine forever.’ That is the assurance that we should be drawing from our sharing in the Lord’s Supper every time we come to the table.” (50)

“A strange perverse idea has got into Anglican hearts that the Lord’s Supper is a flight of the alone to the Alone; it is my communion I come to make, not our communion in which I come to share. You can’t imagine a more radical denial of the Gospel than that.” (50)

“At the Holy Table, above all, let there be praise!” (51)

In My Place Condemned He Stood

In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement
By J.I. Packer & Mark Dever
(Crossway, 2008), pb. 188 pp.

I received my copy of this book today and have just enjoyed looking through it. It is primarily a compilation of three classic Packer essays on the atonement. The T4G guys (Duncan, Mohler, Dever and Mahaney) decided to gather these into one volume after reflecting on how beneficial these essays had been to them. I can say that these three essays have also been beneficial to me along the way. The essays are:

“The Heart of the Gospel” from Knowing God- I still remember reading this for the first time and then the basic content of that chapter becoming the sermon I preached at every opportunity for months. It continues to be a key shaping element in my thought.

“The Logic of Penal Substitution”, first delivered as a Tyndale lecture

Packer’s introduction to John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ- I suspect I am like many others who have greatly benefitted form this introductory essay even though I never read (completely) Owen’s book itself! This essay is already legendary!

Added to these essays is Dever’s “Nothing But the Blood” which previously appeared in Christianity Today, some brief introductory and concluding essays and some very helpful bibliographic remarks from Ligon Duncan. The annotated bibliography on the atonement will be a very helpful resource.

This is a great book to have and to make availabel to others.

Packer on Baxter’s Directory

The following lengthy quote is from J. I. Packer’s introduction to Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory.. The task of writing an encyclopedia entry on Baxter has given me opportunity to delve some more into the man who in the eyes of many embodies the oversight of souls. This quote provides a great contrast between the pastoral teaching of Baxter and much of what passes for instruction today.

“From this standpoint it is possible to see clearly the difference between the ‘how-to’ books that today’s evangelicals write for each other and the ‘how-to’ teaching of the Directory, which is so much wiser and digs so much deeper. Our ‘how-to’s’ – how to have a wonderful family, great sex, financial success, in a Christian way; how to cope with grief, life-passages, crises, fears, frustrating relationships, and what not else – give us formulae to be followed by a series of supposedly simple actions on our part, to be carried out in obedience to instructions in the manner of a person painting by numbers or activating a computer. Wisdom in role-play is all; ‘heart-work’ hardly comes into it. This wisdom is in Baxter, too, though usually in a more sober, searching, shrewd form than we superficial moderns attain to; but his ‘how-to’s’ are regularly concerned with the ‘heart-work’ that is involved in doing what has to be done with the glory of God as your goal, and love and compassion for the needy other as your motive, and a passion for holiness as your driving desire, and a vivid sense of spiritual conflict keeping you humbly distrustful of yourself, and constantly watchful against Satan’s devices, and deeply dependent on Christ every moment. Only a little thought about the models of godliness set forth in the Psalms and the moral teachings of the Epistles is needed to convince one that Baxter and the Puritans were right to zero in on the ‘heart-work’ of right action, and that our generation has been terribly wrong to neglect it. Had we remembered that what makes good works good, according to the Scriptures, is a right form, fixed by law and wisdom, allied to right desires, fixed by the gospel, we might have been spared the egocentric, zany, simplistic, degenerate, half-magic-spell type of evangelicalism which is all that the world sees when it watches religious TV or looks directly at the professedly evangelical community. Such evangelicalism neither honors God nor blesses man. Back to Baxter! would make a good and healthful motto for the Christian leadership of our time.”

Puritans, Your Best Life Yet to Come

There is much wisdom to be gleaned here, both in how we live and in how we shepherd the souls of people. When you think of the pastoral role in terms of “preparing the saints to leave this world in peace when their time comes”, you automatically leave behind much of what goes under the name of pastoral ministry today. We need this perspective simply to understand the Bible and to persevere, but also to shape us into shepherds guiding souls to the Celestial City rather than hawkers of just one more bauble to add to life.

“Third, these Puritans were great hopers. One notable strength of the Puritans, setting them far apart from Western Christians today, was the firmness of their grip on the biblical teaching about the hope of heaven. Basic to their pastoral care was their understanding of the Christian’s present life as a journey home, and they made much of encouraging God’s people to look ahead and feast their hearts on what is to come. The classic works here are Richard Baxter’s massive Saints’ Everlasting Rest, written to show how the hope of glory, analysed by biblical study and internalised by meditation, should give believers energy and direction for present living, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, both parts of which reach their climax with triumphant passages through Jordan to the celestial city. The vividness of the vision of heaven in both Baxter and Bunyan is remarkable by any standards; sanctified imagination gives concreteness and colour to theological perception, resulting in extraordinary power to convey the flow of glory to the Christian heart. The Puritan point, which was first, of course, a New Testament point, was that Christians should know what their hope is and draw from it power to resist whatever discouragements and distractions present circumstances may produce. The unreadiness of pain and death that Western Christians too often reveal today contrasts unhappily with the realism and joyful hope that the Puritan masters inculcated in order to prepare the saints to leave this world in peace when their time came.” (334)

- Packer, J.I. A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1990