Packer’s life shows that renewal begins in building homes and doing personal work in small places. Renewal requires a bedrock belief in God’s trustworthy Word and the lordship of Jesus Christ. Renewal requires accepting costly vocational discipleship and manifesting character.

When J. I. Packer died in 2020, post-war evangelicalism was left with very few remaining representatives of its early days. He lived through three waves of evangelical ecclesiology and scholarship and also helped launch a fourth. Can his life and ministry show us the way forward?
If there’s to be a healthy next wave of evangelicalism, foundation stones will need to be set in place, or perhaps simply cleared and used again. Packer has left at least four of these stones. Each one is biblical. Each one is often overlooked.
1. Strong Family
Packer left the foundation stone of a strong family. Packer was married for 65 years to Kit. They raised three children. They made a home in Vancouver, following their sense of God’s call at a time in life when many people won’t make such a change. Having earned little money in England, they trusted God to provide in a new and expensive setting. Kit managed the household alone during Jim’s many absences. Their partnership honored God and served his people.
2. Humble Service
He modeled the foundation stone of humble service. He taught in small colleges that boasted no international scholarly reputation. Every one of those colleges needed building up or rebuilding. He and his colleagues shared a vision of evangelical theology, formation of shepherds for God’s people, and high-quality scholarly and popular writing. Many of his colleagues are remembered but most are not. Packer’s willingness to serve in such places and in such ways shows a commitment to doing what he believed God asked, no matter the circumstances.
3. Faithful Writing
Packer wrote the books and articles that came his way.
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Jesus was a master at engaging people within their culture, whether they approached Him as friend or foe. He related to people without typical cultural filters. Even His primary followers had different backgrounds and livelihoods. A classic example is Jesus engaging a woman of questionable character at Jacob’s well near Sychar in the region of Samaria. It was culturally inappropriate for a Jewish man to engage a Samaritan woman in conversation.

It’s been said that history is a wonderful teacher, but a terrible master.
In this guest article, Trip Kimball uses history as a teacher. It’s a scholarly look into three significant ways that Christians throughout history have responded to the changes around us —  both good and bad —  to give us a better understanding of how to respond to today’s cultural shifts in a biblical way.
— Karl Vaters

Culture is dynamic. Fluid and fickle. Culture changes over time, sometimes with extreme pendular swings. Popular culture is reflective of shared beliefs, values, and social norms.
Each swing of culture has its own trends, like currents within the ocean, as movements within the larger cultural context.
People tend to respond in one of three general ways to pendular swings in culture: to reject, embrace, or engage each swing. Only one of these approaches is effective in bringing helpful change or productive dialogue.
These pendular swings of culture have one fixed point — human nature. They all pivot on self, our basic nature. Not our identity but our being, our innate essence centered on self-preservation.
On the surface self-preservation makes sense. It’s expected, natural. But when the self is corrupt or fragmented it’s not so good. At its basest level, self-preservation is bound to cause conflict. These conflicts disrupt our shared experiences, resulting in culture clashes.
These culture clashes are very noticeable in cross-cultural missionary experiences, but they also happen across and within sub-cultures.
1) Rejection of Cultural Shifts
Rejection is the preferred approach of those who oppose a culture shift, especially when it impacts them personally. It’s not just resistance but rejection — an unwillingness to accept or consider a cultural change.
Rejection of a cultural shift is a defense of what was, an attempt to turn back the tide of change. On the surface, to those who are opposing the change, it seems gallant and right. But it takes on a sense of righteousness. And indeed, it may very well be a righteous stance.
It’s not hard to find exceptional examples of resistance to evil. The prophet Daniel and his three cohorts (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) refused to worship anyone else but their God, the Most-High God,  the Living God (Daniel 3:12–18, 26; 6:10–23, 26).
Their stand would cost them their lives, but God intervened.
Lessons from History
Taking a righteous stand against evil requires a willingness to die for righteousness’ sake. And God doesn’t always intervene.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a modern-day example of this. He was a Lutheran pastor/theologian who stood up to Nazism and paid for it with his life. His testimony is an example of resisting an evil trend.
Not all resistance to cultural change is so righteous or wise. The Jesus People Movement and the Charismatic Renewal of the mid 1960s and early -70s (parallel moves of God’s Spirit in America) were largely resisted and condemned by the established churches of that time.
The resistance proved foolish and fruitless. It reminds me of what Gamaliel warned Jewish leaders about when they considered contending with the followers of Jesus; …if it is of God, you cannot overthrow it — lest you even be found to fight against God (Acts 5:39).
This is as a lesson to consider when attempting to resist/reject present cultural trends. The resistance of Bonhoeffer and others in the German Confessing Church did not stem the tide of Nazism. That took a world war. And yet the Nazi mindset and influence lives on.
The Jesus Movement and Charismatic Renewal did prevail and reshape the practice of Christianity during the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and -70s. It powerfully impacted American culture, then sadly faded. What was once a powerful cultural influence morphed into the present common approach to culture.
2) Embracing Cultural Shifts
The flip side of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the German Confessing Church’s resistance to Nazism is the German Christian movement. This movement was composed of fanatic Nazi Protestants, a politicized church subculture that was devoid of the Spirit of God.
This movement embraced the political-cultural wave of Hitler’s Nazi regime. They reshaped theology to buttress their nationalistic beliefs, distorting the gospel into their own racist image.
Another spiritual movement in America during the 1970s and early -80s was a hybrid smorgasbord of Eastern religions and amenable philosophies. These quasi-religious groups became known as the New Age movement, a full embrace of the countercultural social revolution of the Sixties.
It epitomized what became known as the Me Generation of the Seventies.
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It is hoped these 27 quotes will spur you on to read more of the man. “Most Christians are not joyful persons because they are not holy persons and they are not holy persons because they are not filled with the Holy Spirit, and they are not filled with the Holy Spirit because they are not separated persons. The Spirit cannot fill whom He cannot separate, and whom He cannot fill He cannot make holy, and whom He cannot make holy, He cannot make happy!”

In my irregular series of articles featuring key quotes from key Christians, I have done a number of them on the matter of holiness. No believer can deny that holiness is one of the most important and most often addressed themes in all of Scripture.
And I take it that most believers would know that one of the great Christians to speak and write on this biblical truth so often was the great American pastor A. W. Tozer. Those who want to know more about him can check out this article: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2009/10/02/notable-christians-a-w-tozer/
Most of Tozer’s sermons and writings in one way or another returned to this grand topic of holiness. Some of his books were totally given over to this topic. One of his most notable works is The Knowledge of the Holy. But any of his books and articles are also worth reading on this.
Here I provide, without references, just a few of many inspiring quotes, listed from shorter ones to longer ones. It is hoped these 27 quotes will spur you on to read more of the man.
“The true Christian ideal is not to be happy but to be holy.”
“Christians don’t tell lies they just go to church and sing them.”
“You knew one thing about a man who was carrying a cross out of the city… you knew he wasn’t coming back.”
“Every man is as holy as he really wants to be.”
“The holy man is not one who cannot sin. A holy man is one who will not sin.”
“It is because of the hasty and superficial conversation with God that the sense of sin is so weak and that no motives have power to help you to hate and flee from sin as you should.”
“No man should desire to be happy who is not at the same time holy. He should spend his efforts in seeking to know and do the will of God, leaving to Christ the matter of how happy he should be.”
“The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions.”
“I cannot think of even one lonely passage in the New Testament which speaks of Christ’s revelation, manifestation, appearing or coming that is not directly linked with moral conduct, faith and spiritual holiness.”
“Although God wants His people to be holy as He is holy, He does not deal with us according to the degree of our holiness but according to the abundance of His mercy. Honesty requires us to admit this.”
“You cannot study the Bible diligently and earnestly without being struck by an obvious fact – the whole matter of personal holiness is highly important to God!”
“The spiritual giants of old would not take their religion the easy way nor offer unto God that which cost them nothing. They sought not comfort but holiness, and the pages of history are still wet with their blood and their tears.”
“We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable.”
“To love is also to hate. The heart that is drawn to righteousness will be repulsed by iniquity in the same degree. The holiest man is the one who loves righteousness most and hates evil with the most perfect hatred.”
“God is holy; and because He is holy, He is actively hostile toward sin. He must be. God can only burn on and burn on and burn on against sin forever. Never let any spiritual experience or any interpretation of Scripture lessen your hatred for sin.”
“We Christians must stop apologizing for our moral position and start making our voices heard, exposing sin as the enemy of the human race and setting forth righteousness and true holiness as the only worthy pursuits for moral beings.”
“Holy is the way God is. To be holy he does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. Because he is holy, all his attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy.”
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