Quotations from J. I. Packer's
Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God
"The temptation is to undercut and maim the one truth by the way in which we stress the other: to assert man's responsibility in a way that excludes God from being sovereign, or to affirm God's sovereignty in a way that destroys the responsibility of man. Both mistakes need to be guarded against."
-- page 25
"...if we forget that it is God's prerogative to give results when the gospel is preached, we shall start to think that it is our responsibility to secure them. And if we forget that only God can give faith, we shall start to think that the making of converts depends, in the last analysis, not on God, but on us, and that the decisive factor is the way in which we evangelize. And this line of thought, consistently followed through, will lead us far astray."
-- page 27
"...the indiscriminate buttonholing, the intrusive barging into the privacy of other people's souls, the thick-skinned insistence on expounding the things of God to reluctant strangers who are longing to get away -- these modes of behaviour, in which strong and loquacious personalities have sometimes indulged in the name of personal evangelism, should be written off as a travesty of personal evangelism."
-- page 81
"The seemingly inevitable glamourizing of Christian experience in the testimonies is pastorally irresponsible, and gives a falsely romanticized impression of what being a Christian is like. This, together with the tendency to indulge in long-drawn-out wheedling for decisions and the deliberate use of luscious music to stir sentiment, tends to produce 'conversions' which are simply psychological and emotional upheavals, and not the fruit of spiritual conviction and renewal at all."
-- page 83
". . . spiritually it is even more dangerous for a man whose conscience is roused to make a misconceived response to the gospel, and to take up with defective religious practice, than for him to make no response at all."-- page 89
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Last Updated October 31, 1999 by Douglas McKay
