This is Life and Books and Everything hosted by Kevin DeYoung, Justin Taylor, and Colin Hanson.

Greetings and salutations. Welcome to Life and Books and Everything.

I'm Kevin DeYoung, and I am here as usual with my good friends, Colin Hanson and Justin Taylor.

And we thought it would be worthwhile to do an abbreviated episode for you and take a few minutes for the three of us to reflect a bit on the life and ministry of J.I. Packer.

We've all benefited from his books and to one degree or another, even his personal influence.

So I think safe to say, Justin certainly has had the most interaction.

I've had very little other than through his writing.

And so, Justin, why don't we start with you? Walk us through a little bit of Jay Packers' life and ministry. Go ahead and

we welcome a brief monologue to fill us in on some of the details and some of the history of

this remarkable man and his remarkable life?

Sure. He was born James N.L. Packer, 94 years ago, July of 1926 in England and his family,

by his own admission, was rather unremarkable They were a lower middle class, Anglicans, and churchgoing, but didn't even really

pray together at meals, so they were a nominal Anglican family.

Kind of the beginning of the Packer story is with his head injury.

If you've ever heard him tell anything about his life, it always

goes back to when he was seven years old and in junior school and chased by a kind of a bully

outside of school, goes into the streak. It's hit by a bread van, kind of a headlong collision.

And fortunately, there was a surgeon in the area who had trained

in how to do this sort of brain surgery, but his cranium was depressed, and he had a chunk of skull

missing. Fortunately, the surgery was successful. He had damage to his frontal lobe, but obviously it didn't affect his

speech or his intelligence. He had to wear this kind of aluminum plate over his head for several

years, which made a young boy who was already a loner, even more ostracized from social things,

...