A Quest for Godliness

Author: TheRobinsons /

There are books one reads in life which seem to calcify the underlying convictions of their heart and offer a rally cry to take up sword and spear abandoning the fear that grips us in vulnerability. I have encountered one of these books of late. J.I. Packer, a man I have recently grown fond of through his writings, issued such a stirring to my own heart in the book A Quest for Godliness.


I do not know how well-read this text is, yet find the ponderings therein of profound implication to modern evangelicalism. The quote I leave you with on this my inaugural post is the following. Ponder it and evaluate the truth therein...


Without realizing it, we have during the past century bartered [the true gospel] for a substitute product which, though it look similar enough in points of detail, is as a while a decidedly different thing...[this new gospel] is too exclusively concerned to be 'helpful' to man - to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction - and too little concerned to glorify God...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 a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth...it is undeniable that this is how we [modern evangelicals] preach...but it needs to be said with emphasis that this is not the biblical gospel. The Bible is against us when we preach this way.


My dear brothers, may we return to the biblical gospel with all haste and take up the words of Richard Baxter and approach all men with God's word "as one that ne'er should preach again, and as a dying man to dying men."

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